The mission of the Spatial and Environmental Statistics in Health (SESH) Lab is to bring together students and faculty interested in the development and use of cutting edge statistics and data science methodology to advance knowledge of the role of place and the environment in human health.
The SESH Lab believes in the power of collaborative research and team science to integrate knowledge across multiple disciples to develop innovative solutions to problems related to place, the environment, and health. We believe in including students on our research teams where they can gain valuable experience engaging with subject area experts and working on challenging problems in public health.
The SESH Lab is a Wake Forest University cross-campus collaboration co-led by faculty from the Department of Statistical Sciences on the Reynolda Campus and the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science in the School of Medicine.
Place, or location, is often an important dimension of the processes that generate data. Spatial statistics explicitly incorporates place into statistical models and data analyses. Frequently, these models incorporate the notion that data collected at locations that are closer together are more similar than data from locations farther apart. In SESH, we think about the role of place and spatial correlation within our research.
We are all exposed to the environment everyday -- the climate, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the social structures in our communities, and the built environment around us. Environmental statistics seeks to quantify and model characteristics of the environment and assess their impacts on outcomes of interest. In SESH, we take a broad view of the environment and explore aspects of the physical, socio-structural, and built environments in our research.
Human health is determined by more than biological factors. It is also determined by social, structural, economic, and environmental factors. In general, the scientific investigation of these factors and their impact on health and well-being of individuals and communities is what defines population health. In SESH, we use our expertise in spatial and environmental statistics to address important questions in public and population health.