In her role as Associate Director and Director of Collaborative Research and Community Health Informatics at The Polis Center, Karen Frederickson Comer fosters research partnerships and community collaborations to advance the application of community and geographic information to the analysis of local, state, and national health issues.

Her work includes: analysis of the social and structural determinants of health; collaboration with healthcare systems, government agencies, community-based organizations, and philanthropic organizations; building the capacity of collaborators for evidence-driven community assessment and planning; and translating knowledge generated both by the academy and by communities into improved and sustainable processes for understanding and effecting population health.

She earned a BSc from McGill University, Montreal, Canada in Geography; a MLA in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana; and is currently working on a PhD. from the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health in Health Policy and Management (Population Health Analytics minor).

More information is available on her Biosketch.