Every health problem has an address.

I came to public health from the other side of the data.

I grew up poor: food insecure, without health insurance, in the kind of household where a doctor’s visit was a decision, not a given. Long before I analyzed public health data, I was the data point.

I started at AutoZone in high school and made manager before I graduated, then kept the job through college, ringing up alternators and brake pads while I studied political science. Retail taught me something no classroom could: how thin the margin is for a lot of families, and how much a single bad week can cost.

The turn came at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, working in HIV surveillance. Buried in that data I found GIS, and it reframed everything I’d been circling. The questions political science had trained me to ask (who holds power, where the money moves, who gets counted and who doesn’t) suddenly had a geography. You could put them on a map and see them.

I’ve been chasing that intersection ever since: the point where a spreadsheet becomes a place, and a place becomes an argument for doing something differently.

Health outcomes aren’t only personal. They’re produced by policy decisions, funding formulas, market forces, and the plain facts of where things are and aren’t. A pharmacy that closes, a program funded in one county but not the next, a highway that splits a neighborhood: these are political and economic facts before they’re health facts, and they leave a spatial fingerprint.

My job is to read that fingerprint and hand it back in a form that changes a decision: not a dashboard that impresses and then gets forgotten, but an analysis a commissioner, a coalition, or a grant reviewer can look at and know what to do next.

A map isn’t a picture of a problem. It’s an argument about what to do next.