Professor Neil Coffee

Neil is a Geographer who has been involved in the application of GIS to population, urban, social and health for 35 years, starting with the successful National Key Centre for Teaching and Research into the Social Applications of Geographic Information Systems at the University of Adelaide 1995-2000 (the first Australian Centre applying GIS to social science).

The use of spatial techniques in health research has grown considerably in the past 25 years and Neil has been involved in several novel applications over this period. This includes the Australian development of the walkability index, accessibility indices, most notably Cardiac ARIA, the South Australian Epidemiological Geographic Information System (SAEGIS), the University of Canberra Australian Geospatial Health Lab (AGeoH-L) and now the Deakin University Centre for Australian research into Access (CARA). These applications have been designed to integrate administrative data with both contemporary real-time exposure surveillance data for local-area social, built and physical environmental risk conditions.

Over his career, Neil has contributed to the broader understandings of the application to GIS to place and health research and the conceptual and methodological challenges faced when applying spatial methods. His research applying spatial methods to social science has been at the developing edge in Australia, spanning applications of GIS with social science and public health. Neil has also been instrumental in developing socio-economic GIS databases, the use of government collected and maintained administrative data for social and health research, and the integration of GIS into government systems.