Postdoctoral Researcher (2023-present)
O'Donnell School of Public Health
UT Southwestern Medical Center
Connor.Donegan@UTSouthwestern.edu

I am a human geographer and a postdoc at the O'Donnell School of Public Health, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. In spring of 2023, I completed my PhD in Geospatial Information Sciences at UT Dallas. Concurrent with my degree, I undertook a research assistantship and advisee role in cancer prevention research at UTSW. I previously studied political economy and urban geography at University of British Columbia (MA, 2013) and University of Minnesota (BA, 2010).

My research falls into three overlapping areas of work:

Political economy and public health
At UBC, my research was focused on the political economy of forced labor in the US South, leading to archival research on Florida's convict leasing program. My current focus is on contemporary political economy of health. The main case study of my dissertation analyzes the social and spatial evolution of the colorectal cancer burden in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan areas over the past two decades of polarizing economic growth and improved prevention technology.

Spatial statistics
While at UT Dallas, I became interested in the practice and theory of spatial statistics, especially Bayesian modeling, and developed a pair of open-source software packages that are primarily for public health research.

Methodology and philosophy of science
My dissertation, titled Plausible reasoning and heuristic methodology in human geography: An invesitagtion of colorectal cancer incidence and inequalities in urban Texas, 1999--2019, engages with the methodological framework of plausible reasoning (analogy and induction) as developed by the likes of George Pólya and Harold Jeffreys. As I argue, their writings on plausible inference can contribute to the formulation of creative and impactful study designs, including for research pertaining to social structures. I also argue that Jeffreys' writings on probability theory anticipate a number of core elements of today's critical realist philosophy (such as critique of the true/false binary, and defense of judgmental rationality).