International Research, On Campus
Honors student's research yields new findings and a prominent article
Honors student Nancy McKeon (SEBS’21), a double major in public health and environmental policy, institutions, and behavior, entered her senior year at SEBS with a wealth of hands-on research experience that connected these two majors. The icing on the cake was seeing that her work, which involved mapping surgery-capable facilities in Colombia, contributed to a paper in the prestigious journal, The Lancet Global Health.
McKeon sought out an honors seminar, “Making and Mapping Healthier Communities,” which was taught by David Tulloch, professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture, who draws on his community-oriented background in landscape architecture to inform new ways of thinking about geospatial research.
For McKeon, mapping was still beyond her reach as she had not taken any geospatial technology classes at that time; still, she took the seminar as it encompassed several topics that interested her. “It was early on in my interest in public health,” she says, “so I was eager to understand the different perspectives of the field.”
Despite her lack of experience with geospatial skills, McKeon was still very motivated to take the seminar as she’d already developed an interest in public health. “After spending the summer after my freshman year conducting similar work focusing on environmental health at UPenn’s Center for Excellence in Environmental Toxicology, I came back to Rutgers hoping to find similar ways to involve myself,” she says.
Motivated by a new understanding of “how one’s environment corresponds to one’s wellbeing,” McKeon asked about participating in research projects at the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis. At the time, Tulloch and his GeoHealth Lab @ CRSSA lab group were exploring the potential for mapping access to hospitals in the South American country of Colombia. McKeon jumped right in.
The work in Colombia is led by a research partnership that includes Joseph Hanna and Gregory Peck, global surgery faculty at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, but also includes other Rutgers contributors and Latin American academics and clinicians. Hanna and Peck first reached out to Tulloch and the GeoHealth Lab seeking help mapping out Colombian hospitals.
McKeon helped with the development of the dataset and improvement of location data for those hospitals capable of three bellwether surgeries. But as the collaboration developed, the mapping expanded to create estimates of two-hour drive boundaries around the hospital locations. Ultimately, the project produced a nationwide assessment of the surgical system’s readiness, supported with mapping across more than 1,000 municipalities, representing six different measures of capability.
Over a few years, dozens of medical students, graduate students, faculty, and clinicians contributed to completing the work, one of the highlights of which was the publication of the 21-author research paper in The Lancet Global Health.
For McKeon, having helped map some of the hospitals and two-hour drive access was a meaningful step. “Seeing the final product of this project appear in the Lancet and have my work be acknowledged was rewarding,” she says.
In addition to seeing the data get transformed into a paper, McKeon also saw how “team science” can work, as she observed how creative collaboration crossed boundaries of disciplines, universities, and countries, thereby teaching her lessons that may shape her own research in graduate school. She is currently applying to Master of Public Health programs and preparing her George H. Cook honors thesis for publication.