My specialty is geographical information systems, which is a new computer-based technology for managing, analyzing, and mapping spatial data. Right now I am collaborating with some professors from the Dartmouth Medical School on using GIS to study the incidences of lung cancer in NH. The general idea is to use GIS to detect if there are any special patterns in the spatial distribution of lung cancer cases, and if this kind of pattern exists, we want to find out if there are correlations between the lung cancer pattern and the patterns of certain environmental factors, such as water quality, air quality, waste sites, etc. This project is one of the five projects of a 13-million program (COBRE program) at Dartmouth supported by NIH.

I believe that this general idea can be applied to other health problems. Indeed, H-GIS (Health GIS) has become a hot topic, because many environmental/public health problems are spatial in nature and GIS provide powerful tools for handling spatial data. People have realized that the geographical analysis based on the new spatial information technologies, including GIS, remote sensing and GPS, is critical in the policy and decision making in environmental/public health issues.

I have a special interest in the health problems in China, where I am originally from. The problems of communicable diseases in China have caught much attention recently, especially after last year's SARS outbreak. I'd like to launch a research on these problems from a perspective of geographical analysis. The research problems may include the spatial pattern and dynamics of disease spreads, outbreak detection, communicating network, etc, and the cultural and policy relevance in these issues. This can be a stand alone research and can also be incorporated into other more "policy-oriented" projects.

I do have some institutional and personal contacts in China that may facilitate this research.