March 2025: The University of Idaho’s 6.2M NSF Where We Live (WWL) project annual meeting was held in Columbia, SC – in conjunction with our partners, the University of South Carolina and the University of Nevada-Reno. Our diverse group worked to lay out our plans over the next two years to assess how climate change perception aligns with quantitative instrumentation data – with a focus on wildfires, drought, and heat. To learn more about this project, check out our team website, https://wherewelive.org.
September 2024: Seamon et al, “Leveraging machine learning to study how temperament scores predict pre-term birth status” Global Pediatrics September 2024 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gpeds.2024.100220
Background: Preterm birth (birth at <37 completed weeks gestation) is a significant public heatlh concern worldwide. Important health, and developmental consequences of preterm birth include altered temperament development, with greater dysregulation and distress proneness. Aims: The present study leveraged advanced quantitative techniques, namely machine learning approaches, to discern the contribution of narrowly defined and broadband temperament dimensions to birth status classification (full-term vs. preterm). Along with contributing to the literature addressing temperament of infants born preterm, the present study serves as a methodological demonstration of these innovative statistical techniques. Study design: This study represents a metanalysis conducted with multiple samples (N = 19) including preterm (n = 201) children and (n = 402) born at term, with data combined across investigations to perform classification analyses.
August 2024: The University of Idaho was awarded a $200,000 NIH COBRE (Centers for Biomedical Research Excellence) Supplemental, funded from the National Institutes for Nursing Research (NINR). This one year project will be focus on developing spatiotemporal modeling techniques to explore maternal health, with a focus on underserved rural communities in Idaho. The project is lead by Erich Seamon, with co-principal investigators Helen Brown (University of Idaho) and Dr. Felix Liao (University of Idaho). This project will partner with a number of agencies around the state of Idaho, including Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW).
December 2023: University of Idaho Led Project Receives $6M to Study Rural Perceptions of Climate Change. A U of I led project (Co-PI Seamon) will receive $6M in funding from NSF to investigate how people in rural communities perceive the extent of climate change. The award is multi-institutional, including the University of Idaho, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Nevada. MORE
October 2023: Idaho’s new $24M NSF EPSCoR RII project, I-CREWS, aims to address the impact of climate, population, and technological change on energy-water (E-W) systems. I-CREWS integrates local knowledge, governance dynamics, and advanced modeling. It involves over 35 core university and college faculty, plus 8 new early-career hires, 10 postdocs, and 20 graduate students while supporting 31 Vertically and Community Integrated Projects designed to reach over 500 students and community members. MORE
February 2023: Spatial Microsimulation paper in Population, Space and Place (2023). Our recent work to use spatial microsimulation techniques to estimate health parameters in the state of Idaho is now accessible in the journal, Population, Space and Place. MORE
September 2022: Vandal Theory Podcast on Idaho Health Modeling. Meet Helen Brown (bit.ly/3LVBSx7 ), a clinical associate professor in the Department of Movement Sciences (bit.ly/3TRb6YS) at University of Idaho, and Erich Seamon (bit.ly/3FQOt0z), a research scientist in the Institute for Modeling Collaboration and Innovation (bit.ly/3JPAg5n). They’ve teamed up to track and publish data about health trends in Idaho. Before their project, this information was only available at a public health district level spanning several counties. But modeling work by these researchers is allowing Idahoans dig deeper into the health of their communities, by providing that data on a county-by-county basis. It turns out, when you zoom in, the story becomes much more nuanced. MORE
