This semester, I am interning at the Injury Prevention Center at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. The IPC is focused on educating and creating programs that will help reduce unintentional injury and violence among children, teenagers, and adults. Recently, injury prevention has gained attention within the field of public health due to the staggering amounts of injuries that happen each year. Many people believe that injuries are due to “accidents” or based on the individuals own fault, however there are many factors that can increase the risk for injury such as the environment. It is the IPC’s goal to raise awareness about injury prevention so that action can be taken to reduce these unnecessary injuries.
At the IPC, I will be helping the center by creating data visualizations based off of recent studies that have been completed. Although the research has been published, to the public’s view, the data that is presented is difficult to understand for many. Therefore, my job will be to translate the data sets that are given to me, analyze them and create visualizations that will be put up on the IPC’s website so that the public will be able to see and comprehend the work that the IPC has done. I will be working closely with Garry Lapidus, who is the director of the IPC, as well as other employees at this organization. I will also be interviewing patients, families, doctors, and other hospital personnel about injury and injury prevention that will also be put up on the website to give the data a story as well as visuals.
For the tools that I will need, it will be extremely important that I use different mapping tools, spreadsheets, as well as interactive charts and graphs that are user-friendly. Furthermore, HTML tools will be very helpful as well to put the visualization on the IPC’s website. So far I am in the preliminary stages of analysis and will hopefully be producing visualizations soon.
View Types of Schools in the Hartford Area in a full screen map