Geo-Social Lab
Publications, presentations, awards, student research, and lab activities.
Major research program
An NIH/NCI-funded research program developing statistically informed small-area cancer estimates and user-centered interactive maps to make cancer data more accessible and interpretable across diverse communities.
CAMSA addresses a persistent challenge in cancer surveillance: reliable, interpretable information is often unavailable for small geographic areas where sparse counts and confidentiality constraints limit conventional reporting.
The project combines statistical modeling, geovisualization, user-centered design, uncertainty communication, and interactive mapping. CAMSA supports cancer-data exploration at ZIP code and county levels and is designed for public health professionals, researchers, patients and advocates, and other community users.
Two CAMSA-related papers are currently published, with additional work in review and preparation.
Research outputs
2026
Wisler Gerdes, E. O., Cai, J., Mahoney, C., Brown, G. D., Clark, J., Charlton, M. E., Koylu, C., Roberts, E., McKelvey, B., Wiggins, C. L., Meisner, A. W., Christian, W. J., Huang, B., Oleson, J. J., & Nash, S. H. Estimating Small Area Statistics and Developing a Novel Mapping Tool to Display Them Using a User-Centered Design Process. JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics, 10(2).
View DOI2025
Cai, J., Wisler Gerdes, E. O., Mahoney, C., Brown, G. D., Clark, J., Charlton, M. E., Roberts, E., McKelvey, B., Wiggins, C. L., Meisner, A. W., Christian, W. J., Huang, B., Oleson, J. J., Nash, S. H., & Koylu, C. Understanding Users in Small Area Cancer Mapping: Insights from the Early Stages of a User-Centered Design Process. Advances in Cartography and GIScience of the International Cartographic Association, 5, 7.
View DOIAdditional CAMSA publications are in review and preparation.
In the media
Broadcast coverage
Three television segments highlighted the CAMSA project and its potential to make small-area cancer patterns more visible and accessible.
June, 2026
New paper: Wisler Gerdes, E. O., Cai, J., Mahoney, C., Brown, G. D., Clark, J., Charlton, M. E., Koylu, C., Roberts, E., McKelvey, B., Wiggins, C. L., Meisner, A. W., Christian, W. J., Huang, B., Oleson, J. J., & Nash, S. H. (2026). Estimating Small Area Statistics and Developing a Novel Mapping Tool to Display Them Using a User-Centered Design Process. JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics, 10(2). DOI
February, 2026
CAMSA received extensive press and TV coverage for bringing cancer estimates and interactive mapping to small areas, including ZIP codes. See the dedicated CAMSA spotlight for publications, press coverage, and television segments.
December, 2025
New paper by lab alumnus Dr. Hoeyun Kwon and Dr. Caglar Koylu: Kwon, H., & Koylu, C. (2026). How We Measure Mobility Matters: Comparing Mobility Change Metrics and Their Associations with Social Vulnerability During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 116(3), 697–719. DOI
November, 2025
New paper: Koylu, C., Kasakoff, A. B., & Torkashvand, M. (2025). Settlement and the intergenerational dispersion of kin as a spatial process in the nineteenth century US. The History of the Family. DOI
October, 2025
New paper by Jinyi Cai and collaborators: Cai, J., Wisler Gerdes, E. O., Mahoney, C., Brown, G. D., Clark, J., Charlton, M. E., Roberts, E., McKelvey, B., Wiggins, C. L., Meisner, A. W., Christian, W. J., Huang, B., Oleson, J. J., Nash, S. H., & Koylu, C. (2025). Understanding Users in Small Area Cancer Mapping: Insights from the Early Stages of a User-Centered Design Process. Advances in Cartography and GIScience of the International Cartographic Association, 5, 7. DOI
July, 2025
Rithik Vir, our high school researcher, joined the Geo-Social Lab this summer through the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa. He presented his poster, The Anatomy of Crowdsourced Family Trees: Discovering Structure in Large-Scale Genealogical Graphs.
Click for Rithik's research poster!
June, 2025
New paper: Koylu, C., Kasakoff, A.B., & Torkashvand, M. (2025). US migration from 1850 to 1920: A comparison of family trees with linked census data PDF https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2025.2516022
April, 2025
We are excited to announce the launch of theCancer Analytics & Maps for Small Areas (CAMSA) in Iowa Cancer Registry.
Funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), CAMSA is an interactive mapping tool to visualize cancer data at the ZIP code and county levels based on user-centered design.
New collaborative paper: Rethinking GIScience Education in an Age of Disruptions https://doi.org/10.1111/tgis.70048
December, 2024
New paper: Koylu, C., & Kasakoff, A. B. (2025). Ethical Challenges in Analyzing and Mapping Historical Demographic Changes and Migration Using Population-Scale Family Trees PDF https://doi.org/10.14714/CP105.1945
November, 2024
Caglar presented a paper at SSHA 2024 in Toronto, CA: Proximity of Parents to Their Adult Children in the United States in 1880: Evidence from Family Trees
October, 2024
Loretta presented Roots & Migrants: A user-centered story map application for understanding and teaching historical population dynamics and migration in the U.S. at NACIS 2024 in Tacoma, WA.
New collaborative paper: A research agenda for GIScience in a time of disruptions
September, 2024
August, 2024
As part of the NSF-funded BluGAP project, Maryam developed the “Rivers and Risks” interactive story map to bridge the gap between spatial analysts and watershed communities and foster collaboration in river protection.
July, 2024
Ariana Luan, Devesh Aggarwal, and Sumin Bae, our high school researchers, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
June, 2024
On June 26, 2024, The Geo-Social Lab hosted the first NSF-sponsored workshop connecting high school teachers and students for the development of "Roots & Migrants", an online educational tool for enhancing public scientific literacy on U.S. history, migration, and kinship networks.
CaGIS+UCGIS Symposium at The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Caglar participated on a panel about the curriculum needs that can respond to and shape the direction of GIScience in an age of scientific disruption.
Maryam won the best student paper award with her paper on 'A Hierarchical Approach for Geocoding Birthplaces in Temporally Continuous Crowd-Sourced Family Tree Data'.
Jinyi presented our research on 'Social Vulnerability and Exposure to Private Well Nitrate Contamination in Iowa: An Interpretable Machine Learning Approach'.
April, 2024
Caglar presented our paper on Analysis of U.S. Internal Migration Using Population-Scale Family Tree Data, 1850–1920 at PAA 2024, April 18, Columbus, OH.
March, 2024
New article by Caglar and Alice: Population-scale kinship networks PDF https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg2193
December, 2023
New paper: Andris, C., Koylu, C. & Porter, M.A. (2023). Human-network regions as effective geographic units for disease mitigation PDF https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00426-1
November, 2023
New paper: Kwon, H., Koylu, C. Revealing associations between spatial time series trends of COVID-19 incidence and human mobility: an analysis of bidirectionality and spatiotemporal heterogeneity PDF https://doi.org/10.1186/s12942-023-00357-0
Maryam and Caglar presented papers at SSHA 2023:
October, 2023
Jinyi presented her research on the Curriculum Design of Artificial Intelligence and Sustainability in Secondary School at the I-GUIDE Forum 2023, October 4, 2023, New York, NY. Read the conference proceeding
Hoeyun published the first paper of her dissertation, "Natural language processing meets spatial time series analysis and geovisualization: Identifying and visualizing spatio-topical sentiment trends on Twitter", in Cartography and Geographic Information Science.Preprint available
Caglar presented FlowMapper.org: Flow Mapping Made Easy! at NACIS 2023 Practical Cartography Day in Pittsburgh, PA. Watch the presentation on YouTube
September, 2023
Caglar gave a seminar “Giant Family Trees in Human Geography: Preliminary Results from US 1789 to 1930”, at University College London, UK.
Caglar presented the paper co-authored with Maryam "The effect of disruptive events on spatial and social interactions: An assessment of structural changes in pre-and post-COVID-19 pandemic networks” at the GIScience 2023 Workshop on Disruptive Movement Analysis (DMA’23), Leeds, UK.
August, 2023
Kelvin Liu and Kevin (Rongxuan) Zhu, our high school interns, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
May, 2023
Hoeyun succesfully defended her Ph.D. on May 8, 2023, and is now a Ph.D! Congrats Dr. Kwon! Dr. Kwon will continue her journey as a postdoc in University of Colorado Boulder! Learn more about Hoeyun!
January, 2023
Caglar was elected as the Vice President of Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS)! Read More
November, 2022
Hoeyun Kwon presented our research on the unequal impact of COVID-19 by analyzing the mobility behaviors of socially vulnerable populations at the AutoCarto 2022 conference held at Redlands, CA. Watch the presentation on YouTube
Maryam presented our research on mapping migration regions and their evolution from population-scale family trees at The 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (GeoHumanities’22), November 1, 2022, Seattle, WA. Read the conference proceeding
October, 2022
Caglar presented FlowMapper at NACIS 2022 in Minneapolis. Watch the presentation on YouTube
Caglar participated on a panel about multigenerational households on ABC/Channel 9 on "Ethical Perspectives On the News" moderated by Leon Tabak. Watch the panel on YouTube!
September, 2022
Super excited to announce NSF funding ($477,734) of our project on population-scale kinship networks and migration! Public abstract
August, 2022
Welcome to Fall 2022 and our new Ph.D. Student, Maryam Torkashvand!
July, 2022
Adelina Chau and Jonathan Fan, our high school interns, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
June, 2022
May, 2022
Very excited to collaborate with Jacob Oleson (Biostatistics) on National Cancer Institute (NCI) funded project ($1,188,804), "Development of Small Area Interactive Risk Maps for Cancer Control Efforts". Public abstract
April, 2022
Hoeyun Kwon won the prestigious Doctoral Scholarship Award of 2022 by the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS)! Congrats Hoeyun!
March, 2022
Hoeyun Kwon won the second place in GIS Specialty Group Student Honors Paper Competition at AAG 2022! Congrats Hoeyun!
February, 2022
January, 2022
Our papers "Measuring and mapping long-term changes in migration flows using population-scale family tree data" and "FlowMapper.org: A web-based framework for designing origin-destination flow maps" have been published in Cartography and Geographic Information Science and Journal of Maps!
December, 2021
Congrats for Hoeyun Kwon for successfully defending her dissertation proposal and becoming a Ph.D. candidate!
November, 2021
Our paper "Measuring and mapping long-term changes in migration flows using population-scale family tree data" has been accepted for publication in Cartography and Geographic Information Science!Preprint available
October, 2021
Our paper "FlowMapper.org: A web-based framework for designing origin-destination flow maps" has been accepted for publication in Journal of Maps! Check Flowmapper! Check out the preprint!
September, 2021
Hoeyun Kwon presented our research on the relationship between human mobility and COVID-19 prevalence at GIScience 2021 workshop on Advancing Movement Data Science (AMD’21). Click for Hoeyun's blog post!
Geng Tian updates us on how he is doing in China, working on a very cool project - unmanned vehicles delivering food! Click for Geng's blog post!
August, 2021
Kaitlyn Hom and Mark Rifkin, both senior high school students, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
Click for Kaitlyn's blog post!
Angelina Evans worked as an intern in the US Department of Energy's prestigious Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program in the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Click for Angelina's blog post!