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 spatiotemporal modeler, who works as a research scientist for the University of Idaho's Institute for Modeling Collaboration and Innovation (IMCI). Erich 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.

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).

Nurbanu Bursa is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Modeling, Collaboration, and Innovation at the University of Idaho and one biostatistician member of the Mountain-West Clinical & Translational Research Infrastructure Network Program. She completed her M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the Department of Statistics, Hacettepe University, Turkey. Her academic research interests lie primarily in statistical modeling for real and large datasets from health, renewable energy, climate change, social media research, and finance using many statistical techniques such as data and text mining, machine learning, multivariate statistics, nonparametric statistics, probabilistic distributions, time series, survival analysis, and survey analysis. She has a lot of nationwide project experience with medical doctors who work in the Republic of Turkey Ministry of Health and forest engineers.

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.