Marynia Kolak is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois. She also directs the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab. Her work examines how social, spatial, and structural factors shape health outcomes across communities. Grounded in health geography and spatial data science, her research draws on socioecological theory and community-based methods to better understand health equity, environmental justice, and access to care.
In this interview, Marynia discusses her work as director of the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab, where she explores how social, spatial, and structural factors shape health outcomes using spatial epidemiology and GIScience. She highlights the role of community-centered design in advancing health equity and reflects on the importance of balance and curiosity beyond academia.
What are your main research interests?
I direct the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab to conceptualize and evaluate places as multidimensional, multi-scalar systems, examining how intersecting experiences of the social, spatial, racial, built environment and structural drivers influence health. As a health geographer I use spatial epidemiology, socioecological theory, and spatial data science to investigate how variations in health outcomes are produced and perpetuated across individual, interpersonal, and area-level scales, with a focus on modeling resource dynamics and multidimensional neighborhoods. As a GIScientist, I also seek to advance new directions in Humanistic GIS research & sociotechnological software development by integrating community-centered design to generate new representations of place
The heart of my work responds to a call of action on the social determinants of health (SDoH) to move the needle on health outcomes, costs, and interventions that promote health equity, respond to structural racism, and how the spatial perspective influences, expands, and enriches the concept of SDoH. Community-level SDoH have been shown to explain over half of variations in health outcomes; by improving our conceptualization and measurement of these place-level factors with geographic thinking, entire new research strategies and place-based solutions are opened. I take this approach to address questions of access in the opioid epidemic (ex. LOUD study), environmental justice at the neighborhood level in Chicago (ex. ChiVes project), as well as advancing research on how we understand SDOH & Place.
What is something you’re passionate about outside of work?
It’s so important to make sure that as an academic, we have passions outside of work. It took me a bit of time to get on board after those years of hustle as a grad student and first years after graduating, especially as I was a solo parent along the way. As you start to settle into the long-term experience of being an academic you begin to realize how invaluable your “off-time” is to refresh and reset, supporting better health as well as more invigorating research ideas. I’ve really enjoyed re-learning what I love outside of work, and lately that’s been: hiking, listening to records, embroidery, and playing the piano. I’m not very good at any of those things, but I don’t have to be! I’m especially excited about finding new hiking spots around the Midwest, best paired with a road trip and visit to a local diner. I like to hike especially slow, stopping every few minutes to identify birds with the Merlin app or check out a patch of lichen, in total opposition to being raised as a city slicker. As someone who studies place and health, it’s nice to take myself out of my own comfort zone to re-experience the landscape in new ways.