Parker Group

What we do

The Parker Group at the University of California in Irvine works on infectious disease epidemiology with a focus on global health. We use a combination of geographic information science and spatial analysis, molecular approaches, statistics, demography, and anthropology.

Many public and global health problems persist because of barriers to accessing proper healthcare. There are an array of barrier types, including: geographic, technological, biological, socio-cultural, and economic factors. A major goal of our work is to identify and then circumvent these barriers.

Our work is collaborative in nature and we work with NGOs (non-governmental organizations, including humanitarian organizations and community based organizations), GOs (governmental organizations) and Universities in endemic nations and regions in order to ensure that our analyses have translational implications – or better yet, so that our work can directly inform scalable public health interventions.

Most of our work so far has concerned malaria in Southeast Asian borderlands, but we also do work on tuberculosis, maternal and child health, arboviral diseases, infections of the central nervous system, syndromic surveillance, cholera, and COVID-19.

Our current geographic foci include: Cambodia, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Syria, Thailand, Yemen, and here in Southern California (U.S.A.)