About

Arthi Rao is the Associate Director at the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) and a Senior Research Scientist in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Arthi provides educational program leadership (especially maintenance and expansion of the Health and Humanitarian Supply Chain Management certificate), teaching within ISyE, and strategic development of CHHS's research portfolio including proposal development support and identifying interdisciplinary synergies. She also manages the Health and Wellbeing of People and Communities Initiative, a cross-campus, interdisciplinary research effort. Prior to joining ISyE, Arthi was the Associate Director of the Center for Uran Resilience and Analytics in the College of Design at Georgia Tech.

Arthi has had a consistent focus on Health and Place research throughout her career, supported by her interdisciplinary educational and professional background in Urban Planning, Epidemiology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Her research is informed by conceptual and methodological frameworks from Social/Landscape Epidemiology, Urban Planning and Landscape Ecology. Her research interests focus on social determinants of health, healthcare access, healthy communities, and spatial methods. She also teaches courses titled “Public Health and the Built Environment” and “Public Health Analytics” at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Her research background and skills in spatial modeling, data visualization, multilevel modeling, and other predictive modeling techniques, complements CHHS's approach to creating healthy and resilient communities. She works with a broad group of collaborators including systems engineers, clinician researchers, biostatisticians, and epidemiologists to develop research and tools to investigate the impact of geography on health, access, and well-being. As a health and place researcher, she has investigated the impact of contextual (neighborhood) impacts on various health outcomes. As a geospatial research scientist, she has built interactive, decision-support tools to inform organizational decision-making and resource allocation for public health organizations as well as local communities. Her work has been funded by federal agencies such as NSF, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) as well as state agencies such as GDOT and the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PIN).