Alum’s research provides geographic lens into COVID-19 pandemic

Michael Desjardins ’16 M.A. ’19 Ph.D. said the training he received in the geography program at UNC Charlotte led him to a dream position at Johns Hopkins University.

“I wouldn’t want to get the training anywhere else,” said Desjardins, a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, of his studies at UNC Charlotte. “I’m extremely happy with my advisors, the friends I’ve made, the support from other professors, the classes I took. All of that led to me being at Johns Hopkins, which was a dream.”

But when Desjardins started at Johns Hopkins in January, he planned to focus his research on bacteria found in oysters and food borne illness in the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. Instead, he’s helping track COVID-19 cases through the COVID Control Study.

Desjardins is part of a Johns Hopkins team that developed an app for users across the country to report COVID-19 symptoms. Users, who have not been tested for COVID-19, voluntarily report symptoms via the app. Desjardins said the app provides real-time pre- clinical risk assessment for potential disease outbreak; analytics that could help inform local governments on how to respond to the pandemic.

He said recruiting users has been a challenge nationally; the majority of users live in the Maryland and Washington, D.C., areas. Desjardins said the app also has quite a few users in Los Angeles and Chicago. He said nearly 7,000 users have made 30,000 entries of their symptoms. The study needs both healthy and unhealthy people, so Desjardins said users who don’t have symptoms should click “submit” every day.

Desjardins specializes in spatial epidemiology, spatial statistics and geographic information science. He said geographers are well-suited to tackle pandemic response.

“Location matters when it comes to health,” Desjardins said. “Interacting with people, the environment—all of this will affect health outcomes.”

He received his undergraduate degree from Keene State College; his advisor had attended college with Eric Delmelle, an associate professor in UNC Charlotte’s Department of Geography and Earth Sciences.

Desjardins, Delmelle and Alexander Hohl ’11 M.A. ’18 Ph.D. authored a study published in the journal Applied Geography. Their research tracks clusters of COVID-19 using space-time statistics. Desjardins was the lead author of the study.

In August 2019, Desjardins presented research at a conference on geomedicine in Glasgow, Scotland, which is where he learned about the postdoctoral opportunity at Johns Hopkins.

While he is intensely focused on COVID-19 for the foreseeable future, Desjardins said he hopes the app can help inform community response to other health conditions.

“In the future, it doesn’t have to be just COVID,” he said. “Maybe we could expand this to influenza-like illness and other respiratory illnesses.”