As a team, we are united by a common interest in research on community and public health. We use methods like ethnography, assessment, and network analysis to better understand and serve our research hosts and the public policy makers that shape their lives. Our work has been funded by the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, the US Centers for Disease Control, the National Institute of Justice, and others. We specialize in research on “hard-to-reach” populations in both the social and geographical senses of the term. This work has taken us from the Arctic to the Caribbean, and from the East Coast to the West. Interested students and collaborators can reach us via email at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Past members of our group now serve as faculty and researchers at the University of Minnesota, Oklahoma University, Haverford College, Pennsylvania State University, and many others.
Kirk Dombrowski is the John G. Bruhn Professor of Sociology and co-Director of the REACH Lab. Originally trained as an anthropologist, for the last decade he has worked in the area of social networks and health. This includes a focus on social inequalities and community health in Native/ aboriginal / Inuit Labrador and Alaska, and HIV / HepC transmission among rural drug users in Puerto Rico.
Bilal Khan is Happold Professor of Sociology at UNL and co-Director at the REACH Lab. Originally trained as a mathematician and a former Professor of Computer Science at the City University of NY, Bilal directs the computational social science work at REACH. He is the primary developer of a range of social science related data collection and modeling software platforms including MABUSE, ODIN, and SNAPT.
Devan Crawford is a senior Director at the REACH Lab. She grew up in Lincoln and graduated from UNL in 2006 with a M.A. in Sociology. She has worked as a project manager and later project director since 2002. She now directs research strategy for the REACH Lab and oversees all operations.
Kim GC serves as a Research Specialist with the REACH Lab. In this role she directs our projects in Nebraska, Puerto Rico and Alaska and oversees the Minority Health Disparities Initiative. In addition, she directs our NSF-funded REU and undergraduate research programs, which trains as many as 15 students each year in health disparities research.
Patrick received his PhD in Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2017 prior to moving into the REACH Lab full time. He specializes in survey research and methodology, network analysis, simulation, and quantitative analysis. In his current role, he oversees graduate student research on projects from Puerto Rico and Alaska, as well as pursuing his own network science-related research here in Nebraska.
We are the Quants and Engineers of the REACH Labs and SNRG. We are skilled statisticians, software engineers, databases architects, data scientists, mathematical modelers, and simulation scientists. We build enterprise systems and technologies that enable collecting social data at scale. We develop new mathematical techniques to discover structure in spatial, temporal and network data from social systems. We program it, model it, visualize it, and interpret it—within theoretical frameworks of sociology, anthropology, and epidemiology. We are a living bridge between the social sciences, mathematics, computer science, and engineering–and we aim to impact all these disciplines.
