Strong HEAL Presence at 2025 GIS in Education and Research Conference

• Post by: Anastasia Soukhov
• 8:30AM Oct 29, 2025
• No Comment

The HEAL team was well-represented at Esri Canada’s GIS in Education and Research Conference at the University of Toronto (Oct 16, 2025).  The purpose of this conference was to facilitate community building by sharing GIS teaching and research work among academics, students, and K-12 teachers.

The Keynote Speaker of the conference was HEAL Director Dr. Jason Gilliland, who launched the conference with a talk entitled “Community Geography: Why We Care What’s Where”. In line with the conference theme of “GIS Across Disciplines”, Dr. Gilliland’s talk highlighted five different community-based GIS projects from the past 20 years, ranging in focus from economic development to public health.

Presentations were also given by HEAL undergrad student Naoya Umayahara, HEAL masters student Neil Kovacs, HEAL postdoc Dr. Shiran Zhong, and two HEAL alumni (Dr. Don Lafreniere & Dr. Alexander Wray).  Umayahara gave a provocative presentation exploring “How Reliable Are Canadian Postal Codes? Examining Accessibility Misclassification using Postal Codes as Address Proxies”.  In a talk entitled “Mapping public recreation opportunities for youth: Examining equity, seasonality, and free community programming using GIS”, Kovacs presented some important community-based work from his ongoing MA thesis.

Zhong summarized a newly published article in his presentation entitled “The Shifting Riskscape: Changes In Geographic Accessibility To Alcohol, Cannabis, And Tobacco In Ontario, Canada From 2019 To 2022”.  Lafreniere (now Full Professor at Michigan Technological University) gave a fascinating talk about his award-winning public-participatory historical GIS work titled “Public Participatory Historical GIS: The Keweenaw Time Traveler”.  Wray (now Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee) spoke about a co-produced project with the HEAL Youth Advisory Council titled “As long as there’s swings: A youth-informed assessment of geographic accessibility to high quality parks in London, Ontario”.

Abstracts of these presentations can be found here, and a video of Gilliland’s Keynote can be viewed here. The conference was attended by over 300 academics, students, and educators from K-12 to the university level.