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Measuring Nationwide Park Access

Keith Spangler, an environmental scientist and Boston University's School of Public Health uses BU computers housed at the MGHPCC to perform spatial data processing of access to parks and health resources.

Where people live is one of the greatest determinants of public health: Is there clean air and water? Are there green spaces nearby? Are there medical facilities and grocery stores within easy reach? Emerging research has looked particularly at whether people live within easy access to health-beneficial locations, such as parks, doctors’ offices, and grocery stores. But calculating proximity “access” distances between hundreds of thousands of population points and the locations of interest is computationally intensive and costly using commercial network analyst products. In this project, researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health, worked with BU IS&T to develop an open-source computational infrastructure to enable calculations of walking and driving route “service areas” in a collaborative, scalable computing environment.

Keith Spangler, PhD
Research Scientist, Environmental Health, BUSPH

Research projects

Foldit
Dusty With a Chance of Star Formation
Checking the Medicine Cabinet to Interrupt COVID-19 at the Molecular Level
Not Too Hot, Not Too Cold But Still, Is It Just Right?​
Smashing Discoveries​
Microbiome Pattern Hunting
Modeling the Air we Breathe
Exploring Phytoplankton Diversity
The Computer Will See You Now
Computing the Toll of Trapped Diamondback Terrapins
Edging Towards a Greener Future
Physics-driven Drug Discovery
Modeling Plasma-Surface Interactions
Sensing Subduction Zones
Neural Networks & Earthquakes
Small Stars, Smaller Planets, Big Computing
Data Visualization using Climate Reanalyzer
Getting to Grips with Glassy Materials
Modeling Molecular Engines
Forest Mapping: When the Budworms come to Dinner
Exploring Thermoelectric Behavior at the Nanoscale
The Trickiness of Talking to Computers
A Genomic Take on Geobiology
From Grass to Gas
Teaching Computers to Identify Odors
From Games to Brains
The Trouble with Turbulence
A New Twist
A Little Bit of This… A Little Bit of That..
Looking Like an Alien!
Locking Up Computing
Modeling Supernovae
Sound Solution
Lessons in a Virtual Test Tube​
Crack Computing
Automated Real-time Medical Imaging Analysis
Towards a Smarter Greener Grid
Heading Off Head Blight
Organic Light-Harvesting Antennae
Art and AI
Excited by Photons
Tapping into an Ocean of Data
Computing Global Change
Star Power
Engineering the Human Microbiome
Computing Social Capital
Computers Diagnosing Disease
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Collaborative projects

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Outreach & Education Projects

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