Spatial Epidemiology using R

Background

Spatial epidemiology offers powerful tools for understanding the geographic patterning of health and disease, but practical, code-based training opportunities remain scarce in India. This hands-on workshop targets public-health researchers, epidemiologists, and students, and is delivered by a team of facilitators: Dr. Biju Soman (SCTIMST), Dr. Arun Mitra (AIIMS Bibinagar), Dr. Manikanda Nesan (ICMR-NIE Chennai), and Dr. Adrija Roy.

Approach

The workshop runs in a structured 4-day format combining lectures with guided coding in R. Content spans foundational spatial concepts, visualisation and map-making, exploratory spatial data analysis, spatial joins, clustering, spatial autocorrelation, and interactive visualisation. Participants work through data dictionaries and curated exercises using real datasets, building skills incrementally across the days.

What we found

Participant learning outcomes include the ability to:

• Reason about spatial data, projections, and spatial relationships.
• Create static and interactive maps for epidemiological data.
• Conduct exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial joins.
• Detect clusters and measure spatial autocorrelation.
• Build reproducible spatial epidemiology workflows in R.

Outputs & impact

The workshop’s key deliverable is a participant Handbook on Spatial Epidemiology using R, accompanied by data dictionaries, exercise sets, and worked notebooks. It was confirmed delivered as a Faculty Development Programme (FDP) at the Central University of Gujarat (CUG), 14–17 September 2025. A separate IPHACON 2025 pre-conference workshop was proposed (proposal dated January 2025) but remains pending and is not yet a confirmed delivery.