The Parker Group at the University of California in Irvine works on infectious disease epidemiology with a focus on global health. We use a combination of geographic information science and spatial analysis, molecular approaches, statistics, demography, and anthropology. 

Many public and global health problems persist because of barriers to accessing proper healthcare. There are many different kinds of barriers, including geographic, technological, biological, socio-cultural, and economic factors. A major goal of our work is to circumvent these barriers.

Our work is collaborative in nature and we work with NGOs (non-governmental organizations, including humanitarian organizations and community based organizations), GOs (governmental organizations) and Universities in endemic nations and regions in order to ensure that our analyses have translational implications – or better yet, so that our work can directly inform scalable public health interventions. 

Most of our work so far has concerned malaria in Southeast Asian borderlands, but we also do a bit of work on tuberculosis, maternal and child health, dengue fever, infections of the central nervous system, and more recently COVID-19. 

We currently have active collaborations in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, Ethiopia and in Orange County, California (U.S.A.)