Talks and Events

• Workshop: Climate & Health (Beerlage & Blanford), Dec, Enschede, NL

• GeoHealth: Disaster & Health (Blanford), Oct 16, Enschede, NL 

• Workshop: Remote sensing and Spatial data for planetary health (Blanford, Paris, Kioko). WEON Epidemiology & Planetary Health. 28 to 30 May 2024 in Zeist 

• Workshop:  GeoHealth for Health Practitioners (N. Beerlage, C Kioko, N Tjaden, Geeraedts, F., Riezebos-Brilman, A., JI Blanford), Nov 30th, Hengelo, NL  

• Workshop: GIS and EOS for planetary health - linking geographic information and health (Blanford, J.I., C. Kioko, C. Paris, M. Belgiu), ECTHM, Nov 19th, Utrecht, NL

Europubhealth+

Jun-Jul 2025

Visiting professor in the Europubhealth+ Integration Module entitled “Building innovative and sustainable solutions to global health challenges“at the EHESP School of Public Health in Rennes (France). As part of the integration module centered around the theme: “Actions to tackle climate change and promote environmental justice.”

AGILE 2021

Geospatial Technologies: on the verge of change 

Jun 8-11, 2021

June 8 (3-7 CET) Workshop: Geospatial Education – teaching through a pandemic and beyond

June 8 (9-5 CET) Workshop: Bodies of Knowledge - Using concept maps for teaching and knowledge sharing in Geo-information and Earth Observation with innovative web tools. 

June 9 paper presentation: Public health needs GIscience (like now!)

Global Conversations 

GIScience Education 

Pedagogies for Resilient GIScience Education

Panel 1 - July 2020 | Panel 2 - Nov 2020 | Panel 3 - May 2021

UCGIS Symposium 2020, Jun 2, 2020 

Hawai'i Pacific University | Honolulu, Hawaii  Online Symposium

Education: finding a balance online and face-to-face, Jun 2 2020, 1:30 EST 

Justine I Blanford | Guido Cervone | Anthony Robinson | Laura Harding | Mark Prettyman

Working professionals come back to education for many reasons. To ensure we are fulfilling the needs of these returning students, educators should create learning environments that are flexible, stimulating, and enable students to develop a wide range of competencies relevant to their work in geospatial technologies and spatial data science. In this session we would like to initiate discussions on ways to advance our current learning models to ensure their relevance for working professionals, and to consider approaches that will succeed in online and residential learning environments.  

As we have all had to move to an online education we have modified this session to include a panel discussion as highlighted below. Please come ready with questions and discussions. 

Presentations will include: 

• Laura Harding - A Balance Between Three Worlds: The Analog Ensemble, Office Responsibilities, and Motherhood 

• Mark Prettyman - My MGIS Journey, From the Comfort of my Home Office 

Panel Discussion will include:

• Online Education: normal vs crisis mode

• Reflections on supervising students

• Open discussion and questions

A very well deserved award : 

the UCGIS 2020 Innovation in GIScience Education award was awarded to the entire global GIScience Education community

In recognition of efforts far and beyond  expectations, during massive disruptions at our universities in spring 2020 :For meritorious service in developing innovative learning techniques to advance GIScience education and promote equity and inclusiveness under trying circumstances and extreme risk of mortal illness.

11th Annual CUGH Conference: Global Health in a Time of Worldwide Political Change, April 18-20, 2020 

Sznajder, K., Eshak, T., Dodoo, N., Biney, A., Toprah, T., Blanford, J., Wang, M., Jensen, L., Dodoo, F.   Adverse Childhood Events and Associated Risk for HIV in an Urban Informal Settlement in Ghana, Poster presentation, CUGH 2020 Conference, Washington, DC, April 18-20, 2020 

Cancelled in 2020 due to the Coronavirus; presented in 2021

Spatial Data Science Symposium: “Setting the Spatial Data Science Agenda”, December 9–11, 2019

The meeting will bring together academic and industry representatives from fields such as geographic information science, geoinformatics, geo/spatial statistics, remote sensing, and transportation studies, with interest in setting an interdisciplinary research agenda to advance spatial data science methods and practice, both from scientific and engineering viewpoints. We also invite experts from related fields and those that are producers or users of spatial data in the social and physical sciences. 

URISA Caribbean (Nov, 2019)

Women in the Geospatial Sciences: Building Leaders for tomorrow (Justine Blanford (Penn State) & Jane Read (Syracuse University)) Few career trajectories are straight forward or linear. In reality many of us have to balance careers with life and take a ‘scenic’ career tour that provide us with experiences that can help us become leaders in the future. During this session several leaders in the geospatial sciences will provide insights into their experiences and challenges they have faced. Panelists:

Moderator: Tricia Melville

• Renee Babb - GIS & Remote Sensing Specialist, GeoOrbis Consulting Inc.

• Cherece Wallace - Director, Land Management Department, Office of The Chief Secretary, Tobago House of Assembly

• Simone Lloyd - Senior GIS Manager & Trainer, Ministry of Economic Growth & Job Creation, National Spatial Data Management Division, Land Information Council of Jamaica

• Sheryl-Anne Haynes - Development Consultant, Town and Country Planning

• Jacqueline DaCosta – 

• Cecille Blake - UN-GGIM and UNGEGN Secretariats, United Nations Statistics Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs

Workshop: GeoSpatial Data Science: A notebooking approach for Interactive Spatial Data Analysis (TBD) (Justine Blanford) As we move into the digital revolution being able to integrate data, methods and code from different sources is of increasing importance.  During this half day workshop participants will use open-source freely accessible software and gain hands-on experience in integrating data with spatial and statistical analyses in a single unified space. Participants will have the opportunity to work with data, learn some coding, develop a simple application that performs statistical and spatial analysis and uses different visualizations to tell a story with data that is backed up by statistical findings.  In this workshop students will use a notebook approach that provides an authoring framework for geospatial data science where you can write, save and execute code while creating high quality reports that can be easily shared and published with a wider audience.  Workshop participants will have access to realistic datasets and gain experience with R, RStudio, Rmarkdown and Shiny as well as many other packages in R. Useful for those interested in spatial data analysis, crime analysis, public health, emergency response and being able to share data, methods in a quick and easy manner as well as develop easy interactive applications.

List a few learning objectives of the workshop

• Objective 1- Become familiar with notebooks

• Objective 2 - Understand the role notebooks play in authoring workflows and geospatial data science

• Objective 3 – Become familiar with different spatial and statistical analyses and how to integrate the two seamlessly for spatial data analysis

• Objective 4 –Become a data story teller by creating, documenting and implementing a workflow

Geospatial Technology and Spatial Data Science Symposium (Nov 11, 2019)

Organizing our first GT & SDS Symposium.  For more details visit our website.

(Geo) Data Science

Abstract: I am a geographer, spatial analyst, GISer who has been applying spatial analysis methods to better understand the world around us for the better part of 20 years. Much of my work has been about issues related to geohealth, in particular the ecology of disease/health across space and time and includes the use of novel technologies and data sources to better understand how places are connected, the impact of human-environment interactions and what this means in terms of the health and well-being of society. To really understand what is going on we sometimes need to use big data sets and look at things from many different angles. My goal in participating here is to learn more about different data science techniques and how to better integrate these in the geospatial world as these are a perfect match. Both deal with data but in slightly different ways. 

Data Science Series, Penn State University: https://datascience.psu.edu/community-events/ 

Women in Geography, Building Leaders for Tomorrow, AAG, DC (April, 2019)

Jane Read & Justine Blanford

This panel discussion will explore challenges women currently face in our universities, and provide recommendations to retain women leaders in geography.

The panel will bring together women leaders from across different areas of geography (human, physical, geospatial) to share their experiences and strategies for success as leaders in their fields. Discussions will touch on one or many of work-life integration, career trajectories and leadership, mentoring and coaching, communication and language, and obstacles, conflicts and solutions.

The motivation for this panel stems from the first TRELIS* (Training and Retaining Leaders in STEM - Geospatial Sciences) workshop held in Madison, WI in May 2018, which brought together 16 women from diverse institutions to network and discuss career development and trajectories in the geospatial sciences. While it is clear that some issues are specific to the geospatial sciences, others relate to women across the discipline. We hope this panel will enable us to continue some of the conversations started in Madison with a wider group of geographers attending the AAG meeting in 2019.

This discussion will be relevant to academics at all career stages, including graduate students, post-docs, and early- and mid-career faculty.

URISAGIS-Pro & CalGIS 2018 conference  

Can my love of maps turn into a job? engaged student scholarship and lifelong learning for geospatial professionals in an online world (Justine I Blanford & Beth King)  Abstract: Have you always loved maps? Need a career change? Or just want to learn something new? Learn how adult learners, at different stages of their careers, are developing life-long learning skills while continuing to work. GIS and geospatial technologies are playing an ever increasing role in helping us better understand our world at a local and global level through exploration, analysis, and visualization.  However, to do so requires a range of skills using a variety of technologies that are continually evolving.  During this talk, we will highlight how GIS and a range of geospatial technologies are being applied in diverse professions and share educational experiences and highlight how you can get started in developing or enhancing your career in the geospatial field through different educational pathways that range from free open-educational resources to obtaining an online professional degree.

Outbreak! A GIS public health response ready cycle: going from surveillance to response and recovery (Justine I Blanford) Abstract: We are all interested in staying healthy and minimizing our risk of getting sick. To do so we want to know how to avoid getting ill by understanding where a disease is, when it is present, if there is a temporal component to its prevalence, and what preventative measures we can do to stop us from getting sick either ahead of time or afterwards, if we do get sick.  To do so we need to plan for public health. I will present, what I call a public health response ready cycle that includes Surveillance (collection of data and monitoring of disease to better understand the ecology of disease); Recovery (diagnosis and treatment) and Response (control and prevention). I will illustrate how we can effectively use this framework for responding to public health as well as outbreaks and epidemics to better understand what interactions are going on, how a disease is spreading/diffusing and what actions may be necessary to protect the population and communicate in a timely manner. Examples that I will use include vector-borne diseases and Ebola.

Making sense of digital data and online lives: Getting to grips with local interactions and communities and what this means within a global context (Justine I Blanford)  Abstract: As we move towards 2020 and transition from the Internet of Things to the Internet of People we will expect to analyze bucket loads of data provided in a variety of formats with a focus on predictive analytics capturing human interactions and human behavior. Geography and in particular geospatial technologies and spatial analysis are well poised for understanding human-environment interactions and drivers of human behavior locally and globally. In this talk I will use different data sources to make sense of digital data at a local scale and what these interactions mean within a global context. One example will examine how local interactions and how space is used differently using bikeshare data. The second example will examine how social media is used to understand local and global interactions through the examination of mobility and what this means in terms of disease transmission pathways within a global context.

GIS Day (Nov 13), PSU

Geospatial Sciences: Where are the women leaders of tomorrow? (Blanford, J.I. & Read, J. (via Robot)) Few career trajectories are straight forward or linear. In reality many of us take a ‘scenic’ career tour that provide us with experiences that can help us become leaders in the future. In 2018, the first TRELIS* (Training and Retaining Leaders in STEM – Geospatial Sciences) workshop brought together 16 women from diverse institutions to network and discuss career development and trajectories in the geospatial sciences. We have continued to build this network in our universities through workshops that we are hosting – one here at Penn State and one at Syracuse University. The purpose of these workshops are to identify challenges women geospatial scientists currently face in our universities, provide an opportunity for active engagement and build of peer-mentorship networks within departments and across the university and between universities. During this talk we will highlight topics covered such as Work-Life Integration (WLI), Career Trajectories & Leadership (TL), Mentoring & Coaching (ML), Communication & Language (CL) and Obstacles, Conflicts & Solutions (OCS), the importance of providing safe spaces for discussions centered on these topics and what’s next. 

ESRI Education Summit Jun 21-22

Join us for the Session Resilient GIS Education

9:00 a.m. — 9:45 a.m. (US East Coast Time (San Diego)

The global pandemic changed the way GIS/GI Science was taught over the past 18 months. Were educators resilient in adapting? What were some of the problem areas and success stories? Panelists from the USA and Europe will provide their analysis and we encourage active participation from attendees. Share your best practices.

justine blanford GIS Geography GIScience Health Disaster planetary health geohealth vaccination malaria geoAI  klass geographic information medicine measles cholera flood heat temperature WASH bicycle accessibility earth observation remote sensing UAV drones worms parasite mental health education python esri arcgis geoda arcgispro geospatial spatial data rainfall green spaces