Louisa M. Holmes

Louisa M. Holmes serves as Associate Professor of Geography and Demography at The Pennsylvania State University, with additional appointments as Associate Faculty in the Consortium on Substance Use and Addiction (CSUA), Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), and Population Research Institute (PRI), plus a courtesy appointment in the Demography Unit.

Her academic trajectory includes a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Southern California (2013), a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco (2013-2016), and prior service as Assistant Professor of Geography at SUNY Binghamton (2016-2020).

Dr. Holmes specializes in health geography and demography, investigating how place-based inequities perpetuate health disparities through social environments, built infrastructure, and policy systems. Her dual research focus examines neighborhood stress mitigation via urban planning strategies and substance use landscapes using demographic/geospatial methodologies. She implements primary data collection through household surveys of hard-to-reach populations, ecological momentary assessment, and community-based participatory research.

Current projects include the Bay Area Young Adult Health Panel Study (2014-2020), geographic analysis of opioid use disorder and treatment access, longitudinal evaluation of Pennsylvania's 2022 Opioid Settlement Funding impacts, and Monongahela Valley community environmental assessments. Her work receives funding from the National Cancer Institute, CDC, FDA Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science, and California-based health research programs.

Actively recruiting graduate students for research in substance use prevention, health inequity within the exposome framework, and climate-health disparity intersections, she maintains the Spatial and Community Health Lab (SCHLab) and contributes to the university's Food Security and Human Health and Population, Environment, and Governance research clusters.