NaNDA: An Open Data Resource for Health Science Researchers

Health disparities are a function of access to and control over the multiple determinants of health, including the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, and age. This webinar will provide an overview of the National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA) and discuss how neighborhoods operate as a social determinant of health. Using data from NaNDA, presenters will demonstrate some of the diverse pathways by which local neighborhood characteristics can shape health disparities.

NaNDA is a publicly available data archive containing measures of the physical, economic, built, and social environment at the “neighborhood” level. Each NaNDA dataset covers all or most of the entire nation (including both rural and urban areas) and represents a set of measures on a single topic of interest, including socioeconomic disadvantage, healthcare, housing, political partisanship, and public transit, with temporal coverage dating back to at least 2000. Anyone with research questions that address "place" – researchers, students, clinicians, policymakers, public health departments, and community organizations, among others – can download NaNDA measures at the census tract, zip code, or country level, and link them with other data sources such as survey data, cohort studies, electronic medical records, and other microdata. A “tour” of the NaNDA archive and its data holdings will be provided. The webinar will close with a discussion of implications for health policy and practice.

Speaker Bios: 

Lindsay Gypin is the Data Project Manager/Curator for the National Neighborhood Data Archive at the Institute for Social Research. She earned her Master’s of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Research Data Management at the University of Denver. She completed the Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research Fellows Programme and serves as the Secretary of the Research Data Access and Preservation Association. Lindsay believes open science and open data promote inclusive access to information and strives to promote equity, diversity, and social justice in higher education.

Marilyn Sinkewicz is a Research Investigator in the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. She is a psychiatric epidemiologist who studies the social, economic and historical causes and consequences of mental health disparities. Currently, she is co-investigator on a NIH-funded grant to examine the socioeconomic consequences of COVID-19 for neighborhoods. Prior positions include Director of Research and Evaluation at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Research Director at the University of Chicago Health Lab, and consultancies with governments and communities

Philippa Clarke is a Research Professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. She is a social gerontologist and a social epidemiologist with over 2 decades of research on neighborhoods and health. Her areas of expertise center around the role of built and social environments for disability and cognitive function. She is the Director of the National Neighborhood Data Archive, and she is Co-PI, along with Grace Noppert, on a new NIH-funded grant to examine the socioeconomic consequences of COVID-19 for neighborhoods.

This webinar fits within the mission of NNLM to provide health professionals with equal access to biomedical information and improving the public's access to information to enable them to make informed decisions about their health. 

This class is for educational and informational purposes in alignment with NNLM goals and does not offer medical advice.

By registering for this class, you are agreeing to the NNLM Code of Conduct