Marynia Kolak
Assistant Professor Of Geography & GIScience at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois, United States
Summary
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RockstarMarynia Kolak is an assistant professor of Geography & GIScience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with 11 years of experience applying spatial data science to health and social inequality. She combines academic leadership and teaching with hands-on research in spatial econometrics, quasi-experimental causal inference, and neighborhood-level health metrics, often translating methods into practical tools and decision-support systems. Previously she led health informatics efforts at the University of Chicago, supervising projects on social determinants of health, opioid geographies, and neighborhood investment scoring. An active contributor to the PySAL spatial analysis ecosystem, she improves documentation and visualization tools like Moran plots to make spatial methods more accessible. Her background spans scalable spatial databases, web mapping, and interdisciplinary partnerships with public health and financial stakeholders, reflecting a rare mix of technical rigor and applied community impact.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
346reputation
20kreached
2answers
1question
Github Skills (14)
data-visualizations10
data-visualization10
data-visualisation10
spatial-data-analysis10
python10
numpy10
matplotlib10
actionscript6
gdal6
flash6
ipython6
plot6
apache-flex6
plotly6
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
pysal/pysal
Jan 2015 - May 2016
PySAL: Python Spatial Analysis Library Meta-Package
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:6 commits, 6 PRs, 2 branches in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Marynia's commits primarily focus on cleaning up and updating documentation related to the NumPy library within the PySAL project. This includes modifications to docstrings and code examples within the spatial weights module. The user also made contributions to plotting functionalities, including the Moran plot, suggesting a focus on spatial data analysis and visualization. These updates improve the clarity and usability of PySAL's spatial analysis tools.
meta-packagepythonspatial-analysispysalspatial
sdohatlas/SDOHAtlas.Github.io
May 2019 - Jul 2020
Contributions:23 commits, 22 pushes, 2 branches in 1 year 2 months
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