Rima Roy
Research Associate
Center for Governmental Studies
Phone: (815) 753-0946
E-mail: rroy@niu.edu
Chandrima Roy is a Research Associate at the Regional Development Institute at Northern Illinois University. She joined as a research associate in 1992. Her responsibilities include maintaining and expanding the Institute's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) capabilities, managing ongoing projects involving GIS, and planning for new opportunities for GIS use, especially in the areas of community and economic development and public health. She also provides mapping and GIS support to RDI Staff projects.
Recent projects include work with the Illinois Department of Public Health, Division of Epidemiological Studies, to map the distribution of the July 1995, Chicago heat death, and analyze the spatial distribution using GIS. She also designed and implemented a statewide mapping system, I EPI-atlas, which allows the user to query demographic and cancer data at different levels of geography, and also perform ring analysis around hazardous waste sites.
A similar system was developed for the American Academy of Dermatology, which is a point and click system to query demographic and membership data at the ZIP Code level.
Rima is responsible for maintaining and updating DeKalb County's E911 system. She has also developed a digital parcel base for the City of Sycamore showing the City's zoning districts which was used for planning purposes. She also created and designed service area maps for the North Suburban Library System which showed the member library boundaries and locations, school district boundaries and locations, community colleges, legislative districts, special and academic libraries.
During the past two years, Rima has worked with several banks to help them comply with the Community Reinvestment Act by the use of GIS in analyzing their service area demographics, and distribution of loans and deposits. She has also developed demographic and economic profiles for territories of ComEd and enterprise zones of DCCA.
Prior to joining the Institute, Rima worked as a Research Analyst at PACE Suburban Bus. She received an M.S. from Calcutta University, specializing in Cartography, and an M.S. from NIU, specializing in Urban Studies.