PhD Student
Department of Geography
Cyrus Sinai is a PhD student studying health & medical geography at UNC. He is broadly interested in working with health systems to improve infectious disease surveillance in the most remote, resource-challenged regions in the world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa. His current research focuses on exploring and quantifying the impacts that basic health facility infrastructure (such as reliable access to electricity and information communication technologies) has on infectious disease surveillance and control efforts.
Cyrus received his B.A. from UCLA in 2015, where he majored in International Development Studies and minored in Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and Public Health. His interest in spatial epidemiology was first sparked as an undergraduate when he had the opportunity to study abroad and conduct research in the rainforests of southeast Cameroon, where he examined the links between local HIV prevalence and the logging and mining industries operating in the region.
Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Cyrus spent 3 years working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with the UCLA-DRC Health Research & Training Program, providing technical assistance to the DRC Ministry of Health on using GIS to improve disease surveillance and planning of health interventions, primarily for African sleeping sickness, Ebola, and polio. Much of his work involved collaborating with local health zone staff in the interior of the country to develop more accurate maps of settlements and health zone boundaries and implementing ‘microcensus’ data collection that has now been used to produce up-to-date, high-resolution gridded population estimates for 5 provinces in western DRC.
Cyrus enjoys all things map-related, roadtrips, and houseplants.
