In recognition of the National Geographic Society's National Geography Awareness Week, the School of Social Work welcomes Adrienne Perry, geographic information systems (GIS) coordinator for the Health and Human Services Agency in San Diego County, to talk about how GIS can be used in the real world to make map data interactive and more useful in problem-solving.

Since they were first developed in the 1960s, geographic information systems have been used by corporations, urban planners and public health officials to determine new business locations, to make infrastructure decisions, and to track the spread of disease. But the sophisticated mapping software — which organizes and displays geospatial, demographic, socioeconomic and other data — is just beginning to be widely embraced by the social work profession as a powerful tool for research, planning and effective delivery of services to those in need.

For example, GIS software is used extensively throughout the medical community to study epidemiology, to look at health care facilities, and to map any system that is visual or spatial, including the inside of a patient's body. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the world's premier disease-tracking organization, uses GIS to study how toxic substances affect people's health. California's Kaiser Permanente uses GIS to decide how much funding to allocate to certain centers and where to situate new facilities.

This event will take place on the University Park Campus and will be teleconferenced to the Orange County Academic Center, Room A, so that Orange County participants may take part from their location.