EPPS alumna Priyanka Vyas (PhD ’17, Public Policy and Political Economy) has published her first book, GIS Mapping for Community Health and Development: A Toolkit for Policymakers and Practitioners, co-written with Juan Aguilera, whom she met while at the Stanford School of Medicine. The book is a practical guide to using maps more thoughtfully in policy and public health decision-making.
Vyas studied in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences from 2012 to 2017, where she combined training in public policy with coursework in Geospatial Information Sciences. She said her time at UT Dallas played a crucial role in shaping her career.
“I am very grateful for the faculty at the Geospatial Information Science program who cultivated and nurtured my curiosity and love for this field,” Vyas said. “I am also equally grateful for the Public Policy and Political Economy program for letting students take courses offered across departments to make sure students have all the skills to succeed in the professional world.”
In describing her book, Vyas explained that “in today’s era web-maps and web-GIS based dashboards [are] commonly used for making policy decisions. An understanding of how to critique a map and ask the right questions is important for anyone using maps for evaluating policies or programs. The book is mainly for professionals who are not formally trained in GIS and use maps on a regular basis for decision-making. It is also relevant for students on how not to trust a map blindly and be paying attention to not only the story that a map is telling but what it is not revealing.”
The book introduces the “3Ps of GIS mapping: People, Place, and Policy” and demonstrates how different maps can highlight different disparities depending on how the same data is represented. Featuring illustrated examples from government websites, nonprofit organizations, media, and her own work, the book provides readers with tools to better interpret web maps and dashboards in contexts such as health equity, environmental justice, and community planning.
Click here to preview the book.