Would you please give an introduction about your background and how you got to where you are now? 

It’s a long long story, but my first career change was when I went from working at Michigan and Colombia as a molecular biologist doing immuno-globulin heavy chain switch research, really classic molecular biology. I switched out of that completely, I went back for my masters and completely changed. I was going to go down the maternal and child health pathway but I ended up going down the water pathway and did that for my consulting firm I’ve had since 94. Before that I worked for the New York City water department. In between those two I worked for a french company that owns and operates water utilities around the world. 

I’d say about seven or eight years ago I got very interested in spatial analysis and spatial statistics. I started learning geographic information systems and spatial statistics on my own. Two years ago I did my first formal training, I’m pretty much self-taught with GIS but then I did the Masters of Applied Science in Spatial Analysis for Public Health at John Hopkins. That’s a two year online program, and it’s the only full blown masters related to public health for GIS. 

Did you enjoy that masters program? Going into it already pretty self taught?

At Hopkins, almost everything was in R. I’m in Guadalajara right now working at a University and I have a bunch of data from a project. I did everything in R and only needed to check in with chat GPT once for a little syntax error help! I was so happy because that was a goal of doing this masters. I had said for years and years I was going to learn R… when you’re taking courses, and you’re accountable and you have homework – it gets done. So now I feel like I can actually do something with R. That was a big goal of that program, it made me learn R. 

What are your thoughts on software engineering crossing over with public health?

The most popular undergrad double major at Berkeley is public health and data science. We have a new school of data science … because it’s so popular. We have the number one public health undergrad major, so it’s a really popular major. The whole field of spatial analysis and visual display of data, that’s really growing, so people who have those skills are getting jobs right away. One of the courses I’m teaching this spring is actually being paid for by the federal office of health and human services and their office of health information technology, because they want to bring those skills to the public health workforce. When I say those skills I mean the GIS and the data analysis skills, because that’s sort of lacking in the public health workforce. We could really see this during covid, there were a lot of county health departments that were faxing their case rates and death rates of covid to the CDC, so the feds are like how is this happening we are so far behind! There’s a lot of reasons for that, mostly underfunding of the county health offices. It goes from county to state, and then the CDC, and there are just a whole bunch of needs and skills that just aren’t there so that’s why the feds are throwing a lot of money at that right now. 

Could you please give an explanation of GIS, Geographic Information Systems?

Geographic Information System(GIS) is basically the software that allows you to collect data and store data, so think of the excel part of an information system that you are able to enter data, so it has the capability of that spreadsheet, but beyond that it allows you to display spatial data. In other words making maps, and then what making maps allows you to do is looking for patterns or relationships. Sometimes we can uncover relationships by linkage of place, so that’s what a geographic information system is, it’s mostly the information system but the information system unlike excel can go way beyond that with analyzing spatial data. 

So what is spatial data? it’s just data that has a location associated with it. Sometimes we can even take data that you wouldn’t think of as data, like are you a democrat or republican and we can link a space like a state. We can see which states have more republicans or democrats and we can make a map that’s blue or red for the whole United States. We can see coastal areas are blue and the center of the country is red, when we visualize data it’s a powerful way to communicate data. What I tell the students a lot is where often leads us to why, if we see “where are covid cases higher?”, “where are most minority populations?”, we can then link them together by place. We can say hey minority populations were more impacted than non-minority populations with covid. There are a million examples. It’s a powerful thing is to see these relationships, and place allows us to do that. 

I imagine that AI would be able to make predictive measurements of data and health data to maybe sway policies that could be important with things that haven’t happened yet related to climate change. Saying this is the data we have, and creating predictive sets of data so that the policy could be enacted sooner without having to have that real data – which would be really unfortunate to actually have? 

You’re conceptualizing it very accurately, what’s maybe missing there is some of the details but I think your big picture view is spot on. 

Do you have any thoughts on AI? Do you run into it with your work?

I use it to fix my R code when I make stupid syntax errors. The project I have here is related to the water quality from different types of water, because most people drink water out of these 20 liter jugs – we started this a couple years ago before the pandemic and now we’re just continuing here this semester, in Guadalajara [Charlotte is a visiting professor at the ITESO the Jusuit University of Guadalajara]. A couple years ago we tested kitchen sink water. If the water is flowing, which usually it isn’t, but when it is they’ll also fill up these 55 gallon drums. Or, they can use these 20 liter jugs. The primary source of drinking water here in Mexico is bottled water, especially those big jugs of water because they last longer. There’s big companies like Coke and Nestle and Pepsi, they have big bottling companies here and so we tested those but we also tested these little water companies that are operating within towns to see if what they are selling is contaminated with bacteria or not. Basically all of the small and local companies that we tested were contaminated and the reason is that they’re not actually disinfecting the water or treating the water, they’re just filling it up from a hose … every garrafon we tested was contaminated, and none of the big companies’ bottled waters were contaminated.

So what’s happening with that now? 

Well that’s the thing now to try to work with these little companies to get them to not only clean the jugs because the jugs are recycled, but to test the water. It’s not hard to do, but they’re selling the water in these poor towns for almost nothing so it will increase the price. Now what we have to do is work with the government for them to subsidize water because they’re not providing water. Mexico did sign the UN Declaration saying safe water is a human right so it’s in their constitution. It’s a big political thing, but I’m on an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, political scientists, engineers, and I’m the public health expert. So it’s a big team and we’re working together. Things take time. 

How do things get done? 

As a scientist the data isn’t the ends, the data is just to provide information and evidence for advocacy. We use community based participatory research which means the community members are involved in developing the research questions and work with us to find solutions. Especially as an American, this little white girl, I’m not going to go into towns of indigenous people and say like okay let me tell you what’s what and who’s who and how we’re gonna do it. That’s going to go nowhere. The university I work with here is a Jesuit university, and being a catholic country the people in these towns really trust the Jesuits so that helps a lot. The other big thing is that the faculty that I work with here have been working in these towns where I’m working for years and years so the trust is there and that’s huge. It’s about empowering the people in the communities to demand their rights, recognize that they do have the right to safe water, and again that Mexico, unlike the US, is a signatory to the UN declaration of safe water as a human right. They have embodied that into the constitution and there’s precedent in the courts for people claiming that right. It takes time but the structure is there to achieve those goals. Here is a link to an article that describes the work that we’re doing here https:// www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/22/8328.

Interview by CeCe Street.