Modeling Idaho Health

Helen Brown has over 30 years of public health experience, as a nutritionist and public health generalist. She focuses on community engaged scholarship to assess, plan, and evaluate public health interventions. She leads the UI working group, Modeling Idaho Health that develops small area estimates (SAE) modeling project to identity health risk factors in Idaho counties and communities. Helen’s commitment health and justice helps inform the models that are created with this project and drives the dissemination of the results to public health leaders, change agents, and the general public.

Erich Seamon is a quantitative climatologist and data scientist, who has an appointment as an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho’s Department of Design and Environments. Dr. Seamon has a M.S. in geological sciences from Bowling Green State University and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Idaho, with a focus on climatological analysis, machine learning, and agricultural processes. His research focuses on statistical modeling techniques to explore natural system spatiotemporal relationships, with a particular focus on climatological impacts and their varying conditional relationships to areas such as agriculture, insurance, human health, and socio-ecological feedback systems. He additionally integrates his research with differing spatiotemporal visualization methods, including Mixed and Augmented Reality (MR/XR). He is currently a co-PI on the University of Idaho’s 5-year 6M EPSCoR Track 2 funded climate and underserved populations project (wherewelive.org), as well as senior personnel on Idaho’s 5-year 20M EPSCoR Track 1, which focuses on climate associations to water and energy systems (idahocrews.org).

Christopher Murphy is a Research Analyst Supervisor for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s Division of Public Health. Chris is the Project Director for Idaho’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a joint effort with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to determine the prevalence of chronic health conditions among Idaho adults, their use of preventive services, and their health behaviors which may increase or reduce risk. Chris has B.S. and M.S. degrees from Oregon State University and has long been interested in how morbidity and mortality factors impact populations (human or otherwise).

Felix Liao is an Associate Professor of GIS and Urban (Transportation) and Human-environment Geography at the University of Idaho, with a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Utah. His expertise includes GIScience, and spatial analysis and modeling, as well as their applications across various fields such as transportation, land use, health disparities, environmental change, sustainable agriculture, and urban and regional planning. In his current research on maternal health, Felix is focused on mapping and modeling access to maternity care in Idaho and nearby states.

Tinashe Byron Gashirai was conferred with a DPhil degree in Applied Mathematics by the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Zimbabwe, in November 2022. He is also holder of an MSc in Applied Mathematical modeling (NUST) and a BSc in Applied Mathematics (NUST) which he completed in 2013 and 2011 respectively. He joined the Institute for Modeling Collaboration and Innovation (IMCI), on the 20th of February 2024. He enjoys conducting research that attempts to solve real-life problems through the application of mathematical modeling techniques and statistical methods.

Jennifer Hinds designs and develops data-driven web applications for a variety of research and outreach activities at University of Idaho and beyond. She manages a team of web/mobile applications developers in Research Computing and Data Services, a unit within the Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Sciences at U of I.