Data for Health

Data for Health topic

The Geography of Cannabis: Does California’s dual licensing program (de)criminalize cannabis and drive unnecessary anthropogenic activity in remote rural environments?

August 29, 2023
by Chevon Holmes. When California voters (de)criminalized cannabis production, the state’s dual licensure requirement forced local jurisdictions to create permitting programs or uphold prohibition. Many Counties developed ersatz zoning ordinances to regulate cannabis activities and hired staff to administer local permits. As an inspector, administrator, and project planner for Mendocino County from 2017-2021, I visited hundreds of cultivation sites and production facilities where I learned first-hand how two legal pathways impacted the ways in which operators could transition their businesses. This post details a dataset created to track, aggregate, and analyze the relationship between cannabis infrastructure and licensing.

My Summer Exploring Data Science for Social Justice: Learnings, Tensions & Recommendations

September 5, 2023
by Genevieve Smith. This summer I joined the D-Lab hosted Data Science for Social Justice workshop at UC Berkeley diving into Python – including TF-IDF, sentiment analysis, word embeddings, and more – with a lens towards leveraging data science for social justice. My team explored a Reddit channel on abortion and used computational analysis to answer key questions related to abortion access from before versus after Roe vs. Wade was overturned. Computational social science is incredibly powerful, but I continue to grapple with tensions particularly as it relates to employing machine learning and large language in international research, and end with key recommendations for CSS practitioners.

Monica Donegan

Data Science Fellow
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

Monica is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management program. She uses computational tools to study the evolution and ecology of agricultural plant pathogens. Previously, she worked on a data science team at a biotech company in Boston.

Marina Blum

Data Science Fellow
School of Public Health

Marina is a master's student in the Health and Social Behavior division of the School of Public Health. She has extensive experience in ATLAS.ti and can help you get the most out of the program. She is passionate about data visualization, and is happy to help with related questions and questions on qualitative methods.

Racism Narratives in Medical Literature

Systemic racism is a driving factor in unequal health outcomes, but it is rarely the subject of study in top medical journals (see a 2021 analysis by Krieger et al.). This project, a collaboration between the UC Berkeley D-Lab and the American Medical Association's Center for Health Equity, aims to measure progress in acknowledging, studying, & dismantling racism by creating tools to track racism-related narratives in influential medical research.

Caroline Figueroa, MD, Ph.D.

Research Fellow, Digital Health Social Justice Project Lead
School of Social Welfare
Digital Health Social Justice

Caroline Figueroa, MD Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. She obtained her MD degree and Ph.D. degree at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her Ph.D. research took place at the University of Amsterdam and at the University of Oxford, where she studied cognitive and neurobiological vulnerability factors for recurrence of depression in patients remitted from Major Depressive Disorder. Current research interest is on digital interventions for depression, with an emphasis on developing cutting-edge innovations that tailor to the needs of...

Alison Victoria White

Changemaker Technology Project
Digital Health Social Justice

Alison (she/her) is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Cognitive Science and minors in Data Science and Journalism. She is interested in precision medicine and the intersection of computer science, data science, and the fields of neuroscience and psychopathology. She now works as a Research Coordinator in Dr. Ian Gotlib's Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect and Psychopathology Lab. In the past, she served as a Research Assistant in labs at UC Berkeley, UCSF, and Stanford in the areas of computational psychiatry, developmental psychopathology, and digital health. She...

Frank Hidalgo Ruiz

Data Science Fellow
Chemistry

I am currently a 5th-year Chemical Biology Ph.D. student. My research focuses on understanding the mechanism by which mutations in a protein called Ras lead to tumorigenesis. More specifically, I aim to integrate high-throughput mutagenesis, coevolutionary analysis, and machine learning algorithms to generate a predictive model. Over the last year, I have built a Python package to process, analyze, and visualize Next Generation Sequencing datasets. I love collaborating across research fields and sharing my passion for data science.

Michael Sholinbeck

Public Health Librarian
Bioscience, Natural Resources & Public Health Library

Michael has worked at the UC Berkeley Library since 2001, and is currently the Public Health Librarian and Liaison to the School of Optometry at the Bioscience, Natural Resources & Public Health Library. Michael coordinates public health instruction at the library, and is responsible for the public health collection. Michael has a MLIS from San Jose State University, an MS in Geography from Oregon State University, and a BA in Geography from UC Berkeley. When not at work he lives out his fantasy of being a rock and roll drummer.