Will Buckingham

I am an Associate Scientist in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with interdisciplinary training in geographic information science, health and place through the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. My research resides at the intersection of social epidemiology and geographic information science, with a focus on understanding where health phenomena exist and why they occur as they do in a specific location. The breadth of my experience combining geographic information in the health arena is demonstrated in the variety of research projects that I have contributed to during and after my doctoral experience, most notably as a collaborator updating and refining the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), a neighborhood-level disadvantage metric, which has allowed for examination of socioeconomic context, health outcomes, and related Medicare policies.

During my transition from doctoral student to independent academic research staff, my role as a collaborator on a number of grants afforded me opportunities to learn innovative research practices which I am now able to apply to new research efforts, many of which center on examining health and place through qualitative geographic inquiry, as well as application of geographic theory and practice to health and health data. Of note, I have contributed to tools for use in population-based, electronic health record surveillance, methods for examining geospatial relationships with health, and the first methods for qualitative geo-coding and mapping.

CDE Research Area Affiliations:

Demography of Inequality; Health and the Life Course; and Spatial and Environmental Demography

Selected Publications:

Buckingham, William R., W. Ryan Powell, Sarah Anne Keller, Kelia J. Hansmann, and Amy JH Kind. “Bigger Isn’t Better: Why Small Area Geographies Are Best for Actionable Index Development.” Papers in Applied Geography (2024): 1-7.

Keller, Sarah A., W. Ryan Powell, William R. Buckingham, Brittney Lyons Boone, Amanda DeWitt, Joseph A. Kramer, Barbara B. Bendlin, and Amy J. Kind. “Assessment of Lifecourse Social Exposome in Brain Bank Decedents.” Alzheimer’s & Dementia 19 (2023): e079476.

Keller, Sarah A., Sarah Lim, William R. Buckingham, and Amy JH Kind. “Life Course Assessment of Area-Based Social Disadvantage: A Systematic Review.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 20, no. 21 (2023): 6982.