Project Summary The parent award funds the Center for Modeling Complex Interactions (CMCI). The goal of CMCI is to support and facilitate biomedical research by making modeling more accessible and integral to researchers across a wide set of disciplines. The teams are encouraged to think of modeling broadly (e.g., mathematical, statistical, molecular) and to recognize that modeling can improve research at every stage, from hypothesis formulation and experimental design to analysis and interpretation. This application is focused on better understanding the effects of a wide set of demographics, economic, health, policy, and healthcare factors on maternal and infant health. Overall, maternal health is a growing concern in many countries, with a greater impact on areas of rurality, economic disadvantaged populations, as well as populations that are underserved (persons of color, Native Americans, Hispanics). Simply measuring maternal health, and its relations to infant health, is challenging. Using limited measurement structures, a region may appear to have a low level of maternal deaths, yet the problem is often more complicated. Previous research has shown that many factors, including direct health measures (diabetes, hypertension, cancer, heart disease), healthcare access (proximity to health care, access to transportation, Medicare availability), and social determinants of health (education, poverty), can combine to increase the risk of negative maternal health outcomes. The central question of this project is: Can we model these complex interactions of factors that drive maternal and infant health, at spatial and temporal scales which can be useful for policymakers and community leaders to effect change? Modeling will be conducted across the state of Idaho, at a county level, from 2015 to 2022. Techniques will be used that allow for the estimation of latent factors, while incorporating geography into the modeling framework. By combining these latent modeling approaches with spatial weighting, we believe we can better estimate how maternal health varies given this wide set of spatially explicit variables. In conjunction with our modeling approach, we will additionally work collaboratively with stakeholders across the state (state officials, community leaders, private and non-profit organizations) to gain insight as to what they view are the most important factors which impact maternal and infant health. This knowledge co-production will be conducted via four (4) workshops across Idaho, where we will use research-driven facilitation techniques to garner insights which will help to inform our model construction. Using this information, we will refine our modeling framework, and re-present these results to stakeholder leadership for final review.