Computational Environmental Health Science

Aiman Soliman, Ph.D.

Senior Research Scientist, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Research Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Where we live shapes our health. It is now widely recognized that a ZIP code can predict health outcomes, yet we still understand little about how urban and rural environments shape exposure and health.  I call this the spatial dimension of the exposome: the places, and the scales, at which environmental exposure accumulates. My research studies how urban environments shape public health outcomes by combining geospatial data science, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence.

Landscape complexity and health outcomes Health risk rarely follows a single land-use variable. I study how the urban environment interacts with human movement, seasonal change, and nested household, neighborhood, and regional contexts. My work spans the spread of Zika virus in Colombia, tumor biology among Chicago residents exposed to neighborhood violence, and maternal health in the University of Illinois Maternal Health Research Center of Excellence (NICHD U54).

Spatial complexity in health models Most models of health outcomes treat location as a single point or an administrative unit. I develop methods that represent the spatial structure and scale of urban environments within statistical, machine learning, and AI models, drawing on remote sensing, social sensing, and high-performance computing.

Bridging geoinformatics and bioinformatics Health is measured from molecules to populations, and place is measured from tissue to city. The two fields that study them have developed separate data, tools, and notions of scale, and they rarely meet. I bring spatial analysis concepts into biological data, such as the tissue microenvironment in spatial omics, and link environmental exposures to health data. Closing this gap is how we begin to explain how the environment reaches biology.

The existing of three hubs in a subset of the commuting network of Chicago demonstrates the hierarchical organization of urban land use. My research focuses on studying emergent properties of land use/cover in different contexts such as studying the spread of infectious diseases. (Data credits: census.gov)