TWO WEEKS OUT! Make plans now to attend. 

The 2018 Spring NEARC Conference is just two weeks away! The Northeast Arc Users Group is excited to host over 200 GIS users at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT on Tuesday, May 8. Thank you to everyone who has already registered to attend! If you still need to register, click here to review pricing and to sign up. 

Spring NEARC is a one-day conference packed with professional development and networking opportunities for all levels of GIS users. In addition to our keynote address (featured below), Spring NEARC also includes oral and poster presentations, a full track dedicated to the latest and greatest from Esri, two workshops, a pub social on Monday night for those arriving early, and the NEURISA "Mappy Hour" Networking Social on Tuesday evening.

New this year, you have the option to build your own agenda by creating a FREE Sched account. This is the same platform used for the Fall NEARC Conference. Logging in to Sched is not required to view the agenda, but it is to build your personal schedule. To begin reviewing the program, go to: www.northeastarc.org/spring-schedule.

REMINDER TO PRESENTERS: Please review the Presenter Guidelines prior to your arrival. All presenters are required to register to attend the conference. Student presenters attend free of charge (thanks to NEURISA!); professional presenters must pay to attend.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS | Shapeflies to Social: The role of GIS in social aspects of health 

Dr. Debs Ghosh, University of Connecticut 

Dr. Debs Ghosh, currently an Associate Professor of Geography at University of Connecticut, has a Ph.D in Geography from University of Minnesota, a MPhil in Population Studies, and a MA in Regional and Urban Development from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. With significant experience working on urban health issues from an interdisciplinary approach, Dr. Ghosh is also a Principal Investigator of the Institute on Collaboration for Health Intervention and Policy, co-director of mHealth/ehealth research interest group, and affiliated with Yale University Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS.

Dr. Ghosh informally describes herself as someone who is driven to understand how health is affected by anything outside of pills, needles, and scalpels. As a trained health geographer, however, Debs' research and teaching are primarily focused on the relationship between place and health, where place is a multidimensional unit, connecting people (vulnerable populations), things (facilitators and barriers), and environment. Central to this is her diverse yet complementary skill set including GIS, spatial statistics, mixed methods, social network analysis, mobile-health, and more recently, the design of interventions. The ultimate goal is to conduct spatial behavioral interventions where research findings are translated to practice. She views this as a way to give back to the vulnerable populations and communities that have historically experienced societal-level exclusion and marginalization. To that end, more recently, Dr. Ghosh is working in interdisciplinary-collaborative teams including academic colleagues and community-based organizations such as Hartford Food Alliance, UConn-Extensions, Greater Hartford Harm Reduction Coalition, DC based HIV-CBOs, Yale-New Haven's Community Health Care Van, and Connecticut's Judicial Branch.