GSLIS Research Scientist Ian Brooks was recently invited to give a presentation to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees at their September meeting. Brooks was one of eight faculty members on campus who gave brief presentations about their research and outreach activities.
The presentations addressed health and wellness research from a broad spectrum of academic disciplines, underscored the broad excellence of the campus, and gave keen insights into the factors that attract outstanding faculty to Illinois as well as why they choose to stay. Over the last eight years, Brooks has been developing INDICATOR, an advanced information system for monitoring the health of a community by looking at human, animal, and environmental indicators. By using data from a variety of sources in a community—including emergency room data, school attendance data, and social media posts—INDICATOR can provide an accurate picture of health outbreaks in a community and help public officials make educated public health decisions.
Brooks, who joined GSLIS last year, previously conducted research at SmithKline Beecham in areas including HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, and heart disease, and led the statistics and life science sections at Wolfram Research. He received a bachelor of science in biophysics from the University of York, a master of science in applied and engineering physics from Cornell, and a PhD in biochemistry from Bryn Mawr College.