Ellen Cromley

January, 2011. Dr. Ellen Cromley, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, University of Connecticut Health Center. Ellen is a former Chairperson of the HMGSG. Ellen's expertise lies in public health applications of GIS and health and social services location analysis.

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Ellen was introduced to geography as an undergraduate major in Urban and Environmental Studies at Case Western Reserve University. After graduation, she worked for The Housing Advocates in Cleveland. This organization included lawyers and planners working on a range of housing issues. Ellen received the MA in Geography from The Ohio State University where she continued to focus on housing. She returned to school in 1981 to pursue a PhD in medical geography at the University of Kentucky. In 1985, she accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut. She remained at UCONN until 2006, at which time she decided it was time to move on.

Ellen co-authored GIS and Public Health with Sara McLafferty (Guilford Press, 2002). She and Sara have completed the second edition, also to be published by Guilford in 2011, with an online supplement of exercises and data. Ellen also co-authored The City in the Western Tradition (Kendall / Hunt, 2003) with Peter Halvorson. She has conducted workshops on GIS for the Agency on Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Academy Health, and the American Dietetic Association and has served on NIH panels in several program areas. in 2010, she served as an expert facilitator at the NIH OppNet conference on basic behavioral and social science research held in Washington, DD. In May 2011, she will be participating as a speaker at the Institute on Systems Science and Health (ISSH 2011) hosted by the University of Pittsburgh and organized by Patricia Mabry of the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research, and she will be giving an address at NIG in December, 2011.

Ellen is currently working with Dr. Blair Johnson of the Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP) at the University of Connecticut on methods for incorporating spatial analysis into meta-analytic studies of HIV/AIDS interventions. She is also developing plans to incorporate environmental health effects into research on physical activity and the built environment.

Ellen may be contacted at cromley@charter.net