From Natural Resources Evaluation to Spatial Epidemiology: 25 Years in the Making
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From Natural Resources Evaluation to Spatial Epidemiology: 25 Years in the Making Pierre Goovaerts1
Received: 8 December 2019 / Accepted: 27 July 2020 © International Association for Mathematical Geosciences 2020
Abstract When, in the winter of 1994, under the supervision of my postdoc adviser André Journel, I started writing Geostatistics for Natural Resources Evaluation in the bedroom of a tiny Palo Alto apartment, little did I know that 25 years later I would be conducting National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research on medical geostatistics from a lakefront office nestled in the Irish Hills of Michigan. The professional and personal path that led me to trade the mapping of heavy-metal concentrations in the topsoil of the Swiss Jura for the geostatistical analysis of cancer data was anything but planned, yet André’s help and guidance were instrumental early on. Looking back, shifting scientific interest from the characterization of contaminated sites to human health made sense, as the field of epidemiology is increasingly concerned with the concept of exposome, which comprises all environmental exposures (e.g., air, soil, and drinking water) that a person experiences from conception throughout the life course. Although both environmental and epidemiological data exhibit space–time variability, the latter have specific characteristics that required the adaptation of traditional geostatistical tools, such as semivariogram and kriging. Challenges include: (i) the heteroscedasticity of disease rate data (i.e., larger uncertainty of disease rates computed from small populations), (ii) their uneven spatial support (e.g., rates recorded for administrative units of different size and shape), and (iii) the limitations of Euclidean metrics to embody proximity when dealing with data that pertain to human mobility. Most of these challenges were addressed by borrowing concepts developed in adjacent fields, stressing the value of interdisciplinary research and intellectual curiosity, something I learned as a fresh PhD in agronomical sciences joining André’s research group at the Stanford Center for Reservoir Forecasting in the early 1990s.
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Pierre Goovaerts [email protected] Biomedware, Inc., 167 Little Lake Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, USA
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Math Geosci
Keywords Poisson kriging · Medical geography · Environment · Cancer
1 Introduction: My Time at Stanford “Pierre, I know you can do it… I want a book written by you, in your style… A book is like a baby, it needs only one father… and I plan to write my own book during my sabbatical.” I vividly remember this pep talk given by André Journel in February 1994 as I was ready to throw in the towel on writing a book and had suggested we collaborate on that daunting project. This conversation, or rebuttal, took place in his office located at the top floor of the freshly built Green Earth Sciences building, far away from other faculty members as he enjoyed keeping a close eye on his graduate students. This was one of many instances where André would boost my
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