Maryia Bakhtsiyarava

Maryia Bakhtsiyarava is Assistant Research Professor in Drexel's Urban Health Collaborative and the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health.

She is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on understanding the role of climate change on health and health disparities. Dr. Bakhtsiyarava is particularly interested in exposures such as ambient temperature and green space. Her work uses methods from geographic information systems (GIS), spatial data science, epidemiology, and demography.

Dr. Bakhtsiyarava received her PhD in Geography at the University of Minnesota, where she was also a trainee in the inaugural cohort of population training program at the Minnesota Population Center. At the Minnesota Population Center she worked on some of the world’s largest and most complex projects that link global population data with environmental and administrative boundary data. As part of that work, Dr. Bakhtsiyarava developed new methods and workflows to address several scientific problems, including a reproducible research workflow for creating reproductive health variables from the reproductive health calendar of the Demographic and Health Survey Program (DHS) for tens of countries, the creation of climatic contextual variables that were subsequently linked to DHS, and dealing with semantic and geometric uncertainty in spatial data.