
You are in for a fascinating conversation in the latest episode of “What To Know.” Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States, and as the Omicron wave wanes, experts examine what the world will look like post-pandemic and how our lives will be forever changed. Dr. Warner moderates the episode, featuring medical anthropologist Carolyn Smith-Morris, Ph.D., M.S., LPC, of Southern Methodist University and Dohyeong Kim, Ph.D., a social scientist at UT Dallas.

The availability of adequate health care facilities is one of the most important factors that public-health policymakers grapple with when preparing for infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID-19.
And one of the most critical resources for controlling infectious respiratory diseases is the negative-pressure isolation room (NPIR). In a new
study published online July 8 and in the November print issue of the
International Journal of Health Policy and Management, a researcher from The University of Texas at Dallas investigated the allocation process and spatial distribution of NPIRs in South Korea during past outbreaks.
Dr. Dohyeong Kim, associate professor of
public policy and political economy and of
geospatial information sciences in the
School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, is one of the study’s co-authors. The researchers used historical data to evaluate whether South Korea is prepared for future outbreaks.

New research from The University of Texas at Dallas suggests food deserts might be more prevalent in the U.S. than the numbers reported in government estimates.
In a feasibility
study published in the journal
Frontiers in Public Health, scholars found that the methods used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to identify areas with low access to healthy food are often outdated and narrow in scope.
Their findings indicate that crowdsourced information gathered from mobile apps such as Yelp could help provide more accurate real-time representation of food deserts in impoverished communities.
“Using data from the city of Dallas, we compared our results with the 2015 USDA database and discovered the agency needs an up-to-date source of information on grocery stores,” said
Dr. Dohyeong Kim, associate professor of public policy and political economy and of geospatial information sciences in the
School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at UT Dallas. “The number of food deserts may be a lot larger than what the USDA says it is.”

Researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas and UT Southwestern Medical Center are investigating new ways to use old mobile phone technology to help first responders in developing countries reduce the time it takes to transport traffic accident victims to hospitals.
Part of the research involves using data collection methods to identify areas of large cities that are prone to traffic-related injuries but lack information to allocate limited resources optimally.
“We are assisting in the area of injury research,” said
Dr. Dohyeong Kim, associate professor of public policy and political economy and of geospatial information sciences in the
School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at UT Dallas. “We want to use traditional cellphone technology in wide use in these countries to provide more accurate accident location information to first responders.”
Kim and
Dr. Fiemu Nwariaku, professor of surgery and associate dean of global health at UT Southwestern, are co-principal investigators on a $427,000, two-year grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center (
grant R21TW010991) to promote health across the globe. Kim and Nwariaku will spend the next two years developing ways to leverage existing, low-cost mobile phone technology in Lagos, Nigeria, to help roadway accident victims.