Speaker Information (1 of 3): Meet Dr. Spoer

Ben R. Spoer is a data scientist and spatial epidemiologist in the NYU Grossman Department of Population Health. He manages the data team for the City Health Dashboard (www.cityhealthdashboard.com), a Robert Wood Johnson-funded free online data platform providing 35+ measures of health and health determinants at the city- and neighborhood-level for the 756 largest US cities (population > 50,000) and 10 small New Jersey communities. Ben's research interrogates health disparities and social determinants of health through a spatial lens. Ben lives in a small NYC apartment with one other human, one dog, and three cats.

 

Brief description of presentation: We evaluated whether using county-level data to characterize public health measures in cities biases the characterization of city populations. We compared four public health and socio-demographic measures in 447 U.S. cities (percent children living in poverty, percent non-Hispanic Black, age-adjusted cardiovascular disease mortality, life expectancy at birth) to the same measures calculated for counties containing those cities. We found substantial and highly variable city-county differences within and across metrics. This suggests use of county data to proxy city measures could hamper accurate allocation of public health resources and appreciation of the urgency of public health needs in specific locales.

We are so exicted to hear about Dr. Spoer's Presentation next Tuesday, November 17th at 1pm EST.  If you have not registered for the Spatial Analysis Lightning Session yet, you may do so here: https://cste.webex.com/cste/k2/j.php?MTID=tff5f18e9989f568f2dee9a45510c8025  

Happy Wednesday!