Dr. Sue C. Grady

Sue C. Grady
  • Professor
  • Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences
  • Geography Building
  • 673 Auditorium Road, Room 207
  • East Lansing, MI 48824
  • 517-432-9998

AREA OF STUDY

Health and medical geography. Maternal and infant health and the impact of local environments.

BIOGRAPHY

I received my Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Sciences from the City University of New York. My Ph.D. training was in health and medical geography at Hunter College where I conducted my dissertation research and I worked on various health-related projects. I also have an M.P.H. degree in International Health from Tulane University and an M.A. degree in medical anthropology from Hunter College. My B.A. degree is in medical geography from the University of Minnesota and I began my career as a registered nurse in Minneapolis. My training enables me to conceptualize health and disease from a human ecological perspective to study place-based clinical (individual) and public health (population) outcomes. I teach “Geography of Health and Disease” (GEO435); “Spatial Analysis of Populations” (GEO436); and “Medical Geography and Spatial Epidemiology” (EPI/GEO819).

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research in health and medical geography focuses on women’s health, specifically maternal and infant health. I am interested in understanding how local environments in which women live impact their health (i.e., increase the opportunity for infectious disease transmission and/or contribute to chronic diseases), which in turn, impair their pregnancies, leading to adverse maternal and infant outcomes. Most of my current research focuses on reducing maternal and infant mortality. I am studying perinatal regionalization in Michigan to improve our understanding of inpatient hospital referral patterns of high-risk African American mothers and infants. I utilize geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial epidemiological methods, including multilevel modeling to disentangle these complexities. The students who I mentor are interested in a variety of health and medical geography topics.