Examining the Impact of Shock Events on Children

WashU Libraries Data Services staff often help faculty turn their research question into tangible datasets. This past year, Data Services had the opportunity to work with Bronwyn Nichols Lodato, an assistant professor in the Department of Education and the Department of African and African American Studies, on two projects. Nichols Lodato’s work focuses on the effects of shock events on adolescent development. The first project looked at the impact of the 2025 tornado on North St. Louis, and the second at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on selected nationwide zip codes.

Data Services team members Mollie Webb (Geospatial Program Services Manager), Ryan Wallace (GIS Librarian), and Zachary Szczepaniak (GIS & Data Analyst) worked with Nichols Lodato to source and analyze data for the study areas and publish the results as spatial web services. Data sourced from publicly available entities included demographic data from the US Census Bureau, individual school statistics from the Missouri Department of Elementary & Secondary Education, business and community resource locations from Esri Business Analyst, and the city of St. Louis Open Data Portal.

When the exact data a researcher is looking for cannot be found, Data Services can help find alternatives. For example, no source of street closure data for the days after the 2025 St. Louis Tornado was available, so the locations of calls for trees blocking the roads made to the St. Louis City Citizens Service Bureau were used as a proxy.

Nichols Lodato used the data from the first project at a conference this summer, and will be incorporating the data from both projects into upcoming publications. Data Services will also be working with her to present an Introduction to GIS session to her students in the fall semester.