Sigrid Van Den Abbeele is a fourth year PhD student in the geography department at UCSB. She received her bachelor's degree in Economics and Mathematics from Coe College. She studies how systemic inequality shapes our health and access to health care. Her master's thesis examined the relationship between residential segregation, population composition, and the county-level supply of Federally Qualified Health Centers. Her dissertation seeks to understand how various policy and population changes impact healthcare access at different spatial scales. She is also interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning.  In her free time, Sigrid enjoys spending time with dogs at the local animal shelter, being outside, and baking.

Vania Wang is a doctoral student in the geography department, with an NSF IGERT Traineeship in network science. They received their undergraduate degree from the University of Washington, Seattle in microbiology, and a masters of public health from the University of California, Berkeley in infectious diseases and vaccinology. At UC Santa Barbara, Vania is interested to further explore infectious disease transmission among human populations--specifically diseases of global health importance that traverse human networks--through mathematical and computational models. When they emerge from the dusky study halls of the Davidson Library, Vania enjoys various derivations of rock climbing (primarily sport and traditional climbing), powerlifting, and tenderly coaxing the probiotic communities of their fermentation projects.

Sean Reid came to us from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he worked on the LandScan Project – a global population distribution data set. Before that, he received his bachelor’s degree in Geography from the University of Utah, along with certificates in Remote Sensing, GIS, and Geospatial Intelligence. Sean is interested in urban dynamics, human mobility, machine learning and nature-society interactions. He loves to hike, camp, backpack, and run marathons. He’s planning to try an ultra-marathon soon…we’ll see how that goes!

Gabrielle Husted is a PhD student in the geography department at UCSB. She earned a bachelor’s of science in nursing from the University of Portland and a master's in Geography from UCSB in 2023. In between her time at University of Portland and beginning her studies at UCSB, she worked in oncology and public health. Now, Gabrielle investigates the interactivity of people, places, and environment (built and natural) as they relate to public health challenges in our society. Of particular interest are social determinants of health, environmental hazards, and health outcomes. She is working with Population Health in Geography (PHiG), and her current projects include exploring environmental exposures and geo-social determinants of health as they impact development and prevalence of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). 

Sofia Kaloper is a first year MA/PhD student in the geography department at UCSB. She received her bachelor's degree in Geography emphasizing in GIS from UCSB. Sofia is interested in geosocial determinants of health, spatial analysis, spatial statistics and location based health interventions. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, video games and fencing .

Dr. Wei Luo is currently a research associate with the Machine Intelligence Lab, Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Wei received his Ph.D. from Penn State University, where he was a research assistant in the GeoVISTA Center with Dr. Alan M.Maceachren. Wei also has a master’s degree in Geography from the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Wei’s research interests include: Geovisual Analytics, High Performance Computational Spatial and Social Analytics, Cartography, Spatial Statistics, Network Analysis, Machine Learning, Complex Systems, GEOINT, and Epidemic Modeling with applications to the geographic components of Big Data, Spatial Epidemiology/Public Health (i.e., Influenza, HIV), Climate Change Impacts, Water Security, International Trade, Social Media, Urban Dynamics, Crime Analysis, Crisis Management, and Nature-Society Interactions.

Wei is currently an Assistant Professor in the department of Geography and the National University of Singapore.

Britta Schumacher received her Master’s degree from UCSB in 2018. She studied the conservation-livelihoods interface, climate change and variability, food security and smallholder perceptions in East Africa. Her undergraduate degree is from Penn State University (2015) where she studied fire ecology, biogeography and the parks-people interface. In between undergrad and coming to UCSB, Britta worked as a forest census intern at the Loquillo LTER site in the El Yunque Rain Forest in Puerto Rico and as an agricultural research intern at the Rodale Institute, the first organic research institute in the United States. Her current work focuses on livelihood dynamics, including migration, perceptions of change and adaptation strategies, in the Kilombero Valley of south-central Tanzania. She is also interested in fertility-food-climate interactions, the HIV-food security nexus, and regenerative, organic agriculture and a sovereign path to livelihood security.

Britta is now a Data Scientist working in the International Programs Center, Technical Assistance and Capacity Building Branch of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Dan Meltzer received his Master’s degree from UCSB in 2019. He studied infectious disease patterns and environmental injustice in relation to mobility and with a focus on Valley Fever. Dan aims to better understand how people move within and through environments, and how those environments leave their mark on health.

Prior to studies at UCSB, Dan was a research associate with the California Environmental Health Tracking Program (CEHTP), where he used spatial analysis and mapping techniques to examine environmental health issues across California. He received a Masters in Public Health in 2014 from the University of California at Berkeley where he studied the connection between spatial patterns of traffic collisions and public transit access, analyzed in the context of broader issues of environmental inequity in the urban SF Bay Area.

Dan is currently a GIS analyst at UC San Francisco’s DREAMLab (Disparities Research Equity And oMics)