Empowering Public Health Through Data

Connor Van Meter is a data scientist at the Emory Center for Infectious Disease Modeling & Analytics and Training Hub (CIDMATH), a CDC-funded Insight Net center focused on advancing infectious disease analytics and response. His work centers on building scalable, secure, and collaborative data infrastructure to support public health research and decision-making.

To meet the demands of CIDMATH’s mission, Connor led the design and implementation of the CIDMATH Data Platform, a cloud-native environment that integrates diverse public health data sources, supports advanced modeling, and enables real-time collaboration across Emory and its partners. The platform was built using Databricks on AWS at Emory, which provided the flexibility and compliance needed to manage sensitive health data and support high-performance analytics.

The platform ingests data from public sources like the CDC and Census, commercial vendors such as Merative and ADvance, and internal Emory datasets. These data are processed using AWS Glue and Databricks notebooks (Python/R), stored securely in Amazon S3, and analyzed within a HIPAA-compliant Databricks workspace.

Connor’s team also integrated tools like RStudio Server Pro, JupyterHub, Power BI, ArcGIS Online, and GitHub to support visualization, spatial analysis, and version-controlled collaboration. Authentication is managed through Shibboleth, and the platform adheres to Emory’s data governance standards, including IRB oversight, encryption, and identity and access management.

Connor shared that AWS at Emory was essential in enabling his team to rapidly deploy a production-grade platform that supports everything from data ingestion to app development and public data sharing. The platform now serves as a foundation for collaborative research with partners such as the Georgia Department of Public Health, Kaiser Permanente, and the Georgia Emerging Infections Program.