“Suppose you had to evacuate a significant portion of Denver,” Deborah Thomas, associate professor of geography, asks her students. “Where would you evacuate Denver to?”

The answer to that unthinkable question depends on the answers to a whole range of other questions. Why do we have to evacuate Denver in the first place? How much time do we have? Is it a preemptive evacuation in advance of a looming threat or a reactive one necessitated by a catastrophe that has already happened? Is the hazard natural or human-made? And then there’s the original question: Where do you send all those people, and how do you get them out of town?

This is far from an abstract question. Most Americans recall the images of stunned New Yorkers leaving lower Manhattan on foot after 9/11 and miles of traffic caused by hurricane scares after Katrina. Thomas has confronted the issue directly: a few months after the twin towers fell, she worked on a National Science Foundation-funded Quick Response Grant to examine how geospatial technologies were utilized for the response efforts.

Thomas is a national leader in the analysis of environmental and health hazards. Her work stands out on two counts. First, she specializes in the use of geographical information systems technology (GIS-mapping with computers) in hazards research. Second, and more important, she applies a geographic perspective to socially relevant issues such as health care, environmental justice and national security.

“I define hazards very broadly,” Thomas says. “Health hazards, environmental hazards, natural disasters and terrorism are all part of it. My main goal is to find ways to integrate social sciences into hazards research. Risk and vulnerability are closely related to geography, the built environment and socioeconomic patterns. We need to understand these relationships to respond effectively to hazards.”

“Suppose you had to evacuate a significant portion of Denver,” Deborah Thomas, associate professor of geography, asks her students.
“Where would you evacuate Denver to?”

Thomas’s wide scope of inquiry encompasses the distribution of health care resources; the effects of drought on Colorado resorts and tourist attractions; injury prevention and response in traffic accidents; and the epidemiology of such diseases as malaria in Tanzania. One project, in collaboration with the Denver Police Department, even looked at policing patterns in Denver to examine racial profiling and the degree of bias in enforcement.

“I’ve positioned myself to bring social science geographic perspectives to projects that might not have otherwise directly considered geography,” she says. “I’m explicitly trying to increase awareness of the contributions geography can make to larger, interdisciplinary efforts.”

In one ongoing project, Thomas is working with Denver health officials to identify optimal sites for the delivery of mass-scale vaccinations in the event of a disease outbreak or bioterrorist strike. The study examines a range of factors that include transit access, commuting patterns, residential distribution and the proximity of health care professionals to deliver the shots. The sites must be physically capable of handling crowds numbering in the thousands (i.e., a large building) and have adequate transit access and parking. After an initial analysis that focused on the city and county of Denver, Thomas is expanding the study to encompass the entire 10-county metro area.

“This project is particularly exciting to me because it represents the junction of health, hazards and GIS,” Thomas says. “Working interdisciplinary is incredibly important. Solving the problems of the world is going to involve working in teams of people who have a range of expertise at a range of levels.”

The 2004 consolidation of CU Denver with the Health Sciences Center, Thomas adds, fostered numerous opportunities for interdisciplinary research. One such collaboration examines how geographic and environmental factors shape physical-activity choices among individuals with cardiac-health concerns. Another looks at service gaps in rural northeastern Colorado. A third long-term project, in conjunction with UCD’s Altitude Research Center, is looking into the relationship between high-altitude, low-oxygen environments and life expectancy.

Thomas’s interest in hazards and health goes hand-in-hand with her GIS expertise. She was introduced to the technology during her freshman year at the University of Kansas where she mapped groundwater contamination for the Kansas Geological Survey. At the time (the early 1990s), GIS was still in its infancy, and there weren’t many people trained in it.

“I didn’t particularly like GIS,” she laughs, “but the job paid all my undergraduate bills. And when I got my degree, there was a job available with the GIS group for the city of Charlotte [North Carolina]. That paid for my master’s degree.”

A dedicated teacher, Thomas places a high value on interaction with students at all levels—not just graduate students but also undergraduates and even high-school and middle-school kids. In 2005 she worked with middle-schoolers in northwest Denver on a graffiti-mapping project.

“The students chose the topic,” she says. “They said graffiti affects the quality of life in their neighborhood as much as anything else. So they went out there with GPS units and a survey scheme, and they logged the coordinates, took digital photos, categorized the graffiti and learned to do GIS mapping.” At the end of the project, the students presented their findings to a university GIS class.

“Kids have an important perspective,” she adds. “They have quite insightful things to say about the environment. They have the ability to systematically collect meaningful information. They learned the GPS technology in seconds; it comes naturally to them. They have a lot of knowledge about the world and a lot to say about it—maybe things that adults should listen to.”
For Thomas, GIS has always been just a means to an end—a technology that can yield practical knowledge and insight about almost any issue, from health care to environmental justice to national security.

“In the end,” she says, “everything I do is related to sustainability. If you’re trying to maintain sustainable communities, you have to be thinking about how you’re going to deal with natural events—drought cycles, hurricanes, disease. If you’re thinking about social vulnerability, you can’t disentangle that from sustainability.”

 To learn more about GIS at UC Denver, visit: www.cudenver.edu/clas/geospatial

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