Department of Geography

CeGIS Associates

CeGIS fosters and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration centered around GIScience and spatial analysis by bringing together 19 faculty associates from 15 diverse academic units across the campus

USC programs associated with CeGIS included the following: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Department of Geography, Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior, Department of Health Services Policy and Management, Department of History, Department of Integrated Information Technology, Department of Political Science, Department of Psychology, Department of Statistics,, Health Services Policy & Management, School of Journalism and Mass Communications, School of Law, and College of Nursing.

Andrew T. Kaczynski

Dr. Andrew T. Kaczynski is an Associate Professor in Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior, Arnold School of Public Health. Dr. Kaczynski’s research focuses on healthy community design and important health outcomes such as physical activity, obesity, and mental health. He is a Co-Investigator with the USC Prevention Research Center and Director of the Built Environment and Community Health (BEACH) Laboratory, where he and his students study how the communities in which we live, work, learn, pray, and play affect the health and well-being of residents of all ages.

Ting Fung Ma

Dr. Ting Fung Ma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, College of Arts and Sciences. His research concerns the development of novel methodologies for data with complex dependence and big volume, such as spatial data, spatio-temporal data and correlated categorical data. He aims to capture the essence of data and address both theoretical and computational challenges through concepts and tools from composite and approximate likelihood theory, and modern computational techniques.

Nathaniel Bell

Dr. Nathaniel Bell is the Director of Research and Evaluation within the Division of Integrated Health and Policy Research at the Institute for Families in Society. Dr. Bell’s research program of research addresses three topics: (1) societal determinants of health; (2) methodologic research on improving access to and outcomes of medical care; and (3) conceptual frameworks to understand, analyze, and improve access to and outcomes of medical care. He collaborates with researchers within the University’s Rural and Minority Health Research Center, as well as the Department of Surgery on a number of projects related to health care provision and access to care, particularly among vulnerable population groups.

Carl T. Dahlman

Dr. Carl T. Dahlman is a Professor of at the Department of Geography and Director of Walker Institute of International and Area Studies . Dr. Dahlman is a political geographer whose research primarily focuses on the effects of armed conflict on human populations, especially the dynamics of ethnic cleansing/genocide and forced migration on post-war state-building processes in the former Yugoslavia and Middle East. His fieldwork has been funded by the National Science Foundation and other sources and his publications include a detailed co-authored book on post-war Bosnia in addition to over 40 articles and book chapters.

Linwan Wu

Dr. Linwan Wu is Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor of at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, College of Information and Communications. Dr. Wu’s research focuses on advertising psychology and communication technology. In general, his research attempts to understand the psychological influences of advertising messages on consumers — as well as consumers’ psychological responses to digital media and online information. Most of Dr. Wu’s research involves conducting empirical studies using social-scientific methods.

Dezhi Wu

Dr. Dezhi Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Information Technology, College of Engineering and Computing. Dr. Wu is a passionate interdisciplinary scholar in the information technology field, especially as it pertains to the intersection of human-computer/AI interaction, health informatics, health IT, cybersecurity, biometrics, and other emerging technologies. Her academic work explores how users interact with computer systems, AI-driven technologies, robotics, and IoT smart devices to accomplish their goals.

Dwayne Porter

Dr. Dwayne Porter is a Professor, Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Arnold School of Public Health . Dr. Porter directs the activities of the NOAA National Estuarine Research Reserves System’s Centralized Data Management Office (CDMO). His research interests include exploring and expanding the increasingly important roles that technology and technological innovations play in monitoring, assessing, modeling and managing our environmental resources and associated environmental, public health and environmental justice issues. Dr. Porter focuses on the use of the tools of GISciences to develop and apply spatial models to study the impacts of anthropogenic and physiographic influences to coastal resources and potential human health concerns.

Peiyin Hung

Dr. Peiyin Hung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Services Policy and Management, Arnold School of Public Health. Dr. Hung’s primary research interests include rural health disparity, quality of care, spatial access to health services, and women health. Her research focuses on geographic disparities in hospital services and quality of health care in the national, state, and institutional levels (e.g. hospital, nursing home, etc.). Dr. Hung specializes in quantitative methods for health services research, using surveys and administrative data, along with econometrics to understand the effects of organizational structure, clinical, and policy intervention.

Amir Karami

Dr. Amir Karami is an Associate Professor of Quantitative Methods/Business Analytics in the Department of Management, Information Systems & Quantitative Methods in the Collat School of Business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research areas include Business Analytics, Social Computing and Social Media Analysis, Computational Social Science, Misinformation and Disinformation, Big Data & Text Mining, and Medical & Health Informatics.

S. Wright Kennedy

Dr. S. Wright Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences. He specializes in public- facing spatial history projects, and he uses geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis to study past and present health, environmental, and socioeconomic issues. Professor Kennedy has investigated a wide range of spatial history topics with GIS, including epidemics, streetcar corruption, hurricane recovery, residential segregation, and environmental injustices.

Yuche Chen

Dr. Yuche Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering and Computing. Dr. Chen’s current research interests include (1) Data-driven traffic operations and demand management), (2) Model prediction and optimization of cyber-physical systems in smart and connected communities, (3) Machine learning based eco-driving assistant system, (4) Transportation air quality and health impacts of exposure. Dr. Chen is broadly interested in data-driven decision making under uncertainty, empirical model prediction and validation with applications to transportation systems.

Lisa V. Martin

Dr. Lisa V. Martin is an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law . She specializes in legal issues relating to gender-based violence, the rights of adolescents, and access to justice. Her scholarship draws from her experiences advocating for adults and adolescents who have been subjected to dating and domestic abuse, sexual assault, and stalking, and working with families living in poverty.

Howard Liu

Dr. Howard Liu is an Assistant Professor studying state repression, human rights, and contentious politics at the Department of Political Science . His work examines how governments use coercive institutions and strategies to establish political control and repress dissent. Much of his research investigates the interconnectedness among political actors via spatial and network analysis. He has published articles in The Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Science Research and Methods, and Journal of Global Security Studies.

Cory Schnell

Dr. Cory Schnell is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, College of Arts and Sciences. His research examines the methodology applied to understand where crimes occur within cities. His research focuses on refining descriptions of the spatial distribution of crime patterns. In addition, he studies the effectiveness of policing strategies to reduce crime and enhance perceptions of police legitimacy. The primary objective of this research is improving the policies and practices of police agencies for them to better serve their respective communities.

Suzanne Swan

Dr. Suzanne Swan is a Professor in the Department of Psychology , Clinical-Community Program, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Dr. Swan received her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology with a Minor in Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois. Dr. Swan’s program of research follows the tradition of Kurt Lewin’s dictum that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory”. Her research focuses on using social psychological theories to understand the factors that predict interpersonal violence, as well as the outcomes of violence for those who experience it.

Shan Qiao

Dr. Shan Qiao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior, Arnold School of Public Health. Dr. Qiao’s academic training is in sociology, anthropology and public health and her research projects use both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Her recent research focuses on HIV prevention and treatment cascade, responses to and impacts of COVID-19, as well as health disparity and social determinants of health. Using mixed method and Big Data analytics, Dr. Qiao explores how structural level factors have affected HIV-related risk behaviors, perceptions of COVID-19, and HIV-related healthcare service delivery and utilization.

Theodoros V. Giannouchos

Dr. Theodoros V. Giannouchos is an Assistant Professor in Health Services Policy & Management, Arnold School of Public Health. Dr. Giannouchos’s research interests include health services utilization and patient preferences, health outcomes, policy evaluation, and comparative effectiveness. His ongoing research focuses on factors associated with frequent use of emergency services and employs econometric methods to various large healthcare datasets, including electronic claims records, and administrative data. Dr. Giannouchos specializes in quantitative methods to conduct health services, health economics and outcomes research and cost- effectiveness analysis.

Chen Liang

Dr. Chen Liang is an Assistant Professor in Health Services Policy & Management, Arnold School of Public Health. Dr. Liang’s research interest focuses on the development and application of data science, informatics, and artificial intelligence that lead to a safe and intelligent health system. His recent work involves heterogeneous health data integration, Electronic Health Records (EHR) based phenotyping and data mining, medical knowledge representation, EHR-based machine learning and predictive modeling, and clinical natural language processing.

Hunter Boehme

Dr. Hunter Boehme is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, College of Arts and Sciences. His research interests focuses on policy change and policing, police use of force, geospatial crime analysis, and extremism/hate crimes.

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