A few years ago, Dr. Paul Lantos received a Duke Education and Research in China (ERIC) grant to train students in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which are digital tools for disease mapping.
With the support of this grant, Lantos just completed a trip to Mongolia and China. In Mongolia, he ran a day long training workshop in GIS for the National Center for Public Health (under the Mongolian Ministry of Health). He then gave a keynote address on Disease Mapping for the 6th International Conference on One Health, which was also held in Mongolia. One Health is a multidisciplinary field covering the shared interests of human medicine, veterinary medicine, environmental health, and public health. This conference was run by Dr. Gregory Gray (from Duke Infectious Diseases).
Following his trip to Mongolia, Lantos then headed to Duke-Kunshan University in China, where he ran another day long GIS workshop, this time for DKU undergraduates and MSc Global Health students. He gave a graduate seminar on disease mapping.
Lantos met with a number of students, trainees, and public health workers in both countries to help provide career mentorship and to give advice on research projects of theirs that make use of GIS.
"This was my third trip to Mongolia and my second to DKU."
- Paul Lantos, MD, GIM Associate Professor of Medicine
"This was my third trip to Mongolia and my second to DKU," says Lantos, who is currently in the process of recording online training modules for GIS that can be used around the world to develop skills in working with geographic data.