Wenwu Tang
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Public health agencies look for disease clusters, places and times where more cases occur than expected, to decide where to focus prevention. But people move.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
disease cluster detection
space-time clustering
spatiotemporal analysis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure how residential mobility, people's moves between home addresses, affects the validity of space-time disease cluster detection using simulated movement trajectories.
- Estimate how fine the spatial and temporal detail of residential histories must be before real disease clusters go undetected.
- Evaluate how space-time relationships built from patient mobility change the relative risk of existing clusters, using two large datasets of post-diagnosis patient moves.
More about the research
If a cluster is mapped only by where patients live at diagnosis, moves before or after can blur or hide the real pattern. This project asks how residential mobility, meaning people's changes of home address over time, affects the accuracy of space-time cluster detection, and how to correct for it.
Why it matters
More accurate cluster detection could help health departments find real disease hotspots and respond to future outbreaks with better-targeted prevention. Findings and recommendations will be shared with local, regional and federal stakeholders. The methods could also help other fields that rely on clustering, such as animal movement ecology, transportation planning and criminology.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Amy Wesolowski
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
Collect and standardize many human mobility datasets gathered by different methods, and statistically describe how movement varies at individual, household, community and larger scales.
Nicola Camp
University of Utah, UT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Assemble and integrate genealogical, medical and vital records for over 11 million linked individuals, and provide data analysis and interpretation for cancer investigations.
Lauren Magee
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build trauma networks of everyone present at a shooting (victims and witnesses in police records) plus family members of firearm injury victims identified through Medicaid, using individually linked healthcare and police records from 2016–2022.
The school
University of North Carolina at Charlotte: 9 labs on PI Pages, $95M a year on research, 196 research doctorates a year.
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