Richard Fry

Dr Rich Fry is a Senior Lecturer in GIS and Health Geographies and the Postgraduate Admissions Tutor for the Medical School. Rich graduated with a BSc (Hons) Physical Geography from Swansea before completing an MSc and PhD in GIS and computing at the University of South Wales following some time out in industry. Following a post-doctoral position at the Wales Institute for Socio-Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) he returned to Swansea, joining the Medical School as a Senior Research Officer specialising in GIS and privacy protecting spatial data linkage. Rich currently leads geography and health research for substantive sites including HDR UK Wales and Northern Ireland, ADR Wales and the National Centre for Population Health and Wellbeing. Rich teaches on several courses including GIS (GEGM22), PM-344 Capstone and PMIM 102 Scientific Computing and Health Care. He is module lead for PMIM502 for Health Data Visualisation.

Research Interests

The use of geography and spatial data science is crucial in understanding how the environment in which we live influences and impacts on human health. Rich’s research focuses on how to build computational models of the built environment, using geographic information systems, which can be anonymously linked to routinely collected health data to help us understand the interactions between the natural and built environment and population health. The models are designed to capture change over time using administrative, satellite and routinely captured spatially referenced data to gain new insights into population health. Rich is also interested in how the use of novel and cutting-edge techniques in Machine Learning, GPU and distributed computing can be leveraged when building these models.