Heather Conley
Summer 2007 WAS*IS
When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. However, I got to college and found geography suited me particularly well, and I have never looked back. In graduate school at the University of Iowa, I became interested in the relationship between climate and human health, particularly looking at emerging infectious diseases and anomalous climate patterns. My dissertation examined the relationship between climate variability and Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome in the western United States using Self-Organizing Maps to characterize sequences of wet- and dry-spells related to ecological changes in deer mouse habitat. I currently hang my hat in the Department of Geography-Geology at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, where I am an Assistant Professor of Geography.
One of my primary reasons for attending the WAS*IS Workshop is to find new ways to integrate risk perception and subsequent decision-making into studies of climate-health relationships. My current research project investigates West Nile Virus activity in Idaho. This summer, I plan to focus on the role of Mosquito Abatement Districts (MADs) in mosquito control activities, so I will be switching my focus from climate to scales more consistent with meteorology. I will spend much of this summer interviewing people involved in mosquito control about the impact that meteorological and climatological events have on mosquito population dynamics. I hope to incorporate that stakeholder knowledge into a tool to help decision-makers determine when and where they should focus mosquito control efforts. My other research interests right now examines how small rural municipalities, given limited resources, cope with and respond to extreme weather events.
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