About Us
The U.S. COVID-19 Atlas is a county-level clustering surveillance tool to provide quick access to county-level COVID-19 estimates, longitudinal exploration, and statistical cluster detection. It reveals a more detailed pandemic landscape with local hotspots of surging COVID cases that are missed by state-level data.
In addition to basic visualizations at county & state scales, the Atlas also provides statistical hotspots to support surveillance and decision-making that have helped a wide range of users, from rural health department officials to businesses across the country planning to re-open safely.
It was started in early March and launched less than two weeks later by the University of Chicago’s Center for Spatial Data Science (CSDS) based on its GeoDaWeb platform. A network of volunteers activated to contribute to its development, and the atlas has since expanded as a research coalition across multiple institutions.
Today, the US COVID Atlas Project is a coalition of research partners and contributors that have been integral to developing and expanding the Covid Atlas to meet the needs of health practitioners, planners, researchers, and the public, with support in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The project remains a free and opensource GIS platform, building on GeoDa libraries.
Leadership
Marynia Kolak, MS, MFA, PhD (CSDS)
Assistant Director for Health Informatics,
Health Geographer, GIScientist
Qinyun Lin, PhD (CSDS)
Postdoctoral Fellow specializing in causal inference, social network analysis & multi-level models
Core Development Team
Coalition Design & Communications Team
Coalition Partners
Lawrence T. Brown, PhD (CHR&R)
Director of County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, Visiting Associate Professor in the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute
Bin Yu, PhD (Berkeley)
Chancellor's Distinguished Professor, Principal of Yu Research Group, Departments of Statistics and EECS
Brian Yandell, PhD (UW-Madison)
Interim Director at the American Family
Insurance Data Science Institute, lead of
the UW-Madison COVID Data Science Team.
Contributors
Julia Koschinsky
(CSDS)Executive Director of the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago.
Luc Anselin (CSDS)
Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of
Sociology at the College, Director of the Center for
Spatial Data Science, & a Senior Fellow at NORC.
Steven Wangen (UW-Madison)
Assistant Scientist at the Wisconsin Institute
for Discovery, and Data Scientist at the American
Family Insurance Data Science Institute.
Erin Abbott
(CSDS)3rd year Environmental & Urban Studies major, Geographic Information Science minor, and Pre-health at the University of Chicago.
Sihan Mao (CSDS Alumni)
Senior Data & Policy Analyst, Department of
Innovation & Performance, City of Pittsburgh
Arianna Israel
UX Engineer
Robert Martin
Software Engineer
