Fall 2017 Seminar Schedule.

Join us every Friday from 12:45-1:45pm in BUSM L210 unless otherwise indicated below:

Detailed Schedule

Adaptations for the Future: Minimizing Climate Change Effects on Health

EH Seminar Series – Fall 2017

September 8:

Speakers:  Lindsey Butler and Victoria Fruh

Doctoral students, Department of Environmental Health, BUSPH

Seminar Title:  An Intro to Climate Change Adaptations for the Future

September 15:

Speaker:  Timothy A. Bouley, MD,  Global Health and Environmental Specialist, The World Bank

Seminar Title:  World Banking on Climate Change and Health

Seminar Summary: As an institutional priority of the World Bank, climate change has become central to the institution’s development lending. Projects are screened, developed specifically for, and address both mitigation and adaptation dimensions of climate change. As part of this work, the World Bank has developed sector-specific strategies toward targeted investment; one of these is health. This talk will provide an overview of World Bank efforts toward a new approach for a new era of climate impact: climate-smart healthcare.

Speaker Bio:  Timothy Bouley is a global health and environmental specialist at the World Bank Group. He founded and currently leads the climate and health portfolio, working across sector and region. He also works on lending programs that address ocean and fisheries science, one health, environmental health, infectious disease, satellite remote sensing and earth observation, data science and (non-health dimensions of) climate change. Trained as a medical doctor and environmental scientist, he has in recent years worked to develop the Global Partnership for Oceans, with the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board of the US National Academy of Sciences, with the World Health Organization’s climate change and health cluster, and in health systems in India and Rwanda. He holds degrees in biology, bioethics, geography, and medicine from Tufts, Harvard, Oxford, and Duke.

September 22:

Speakers:  John Spengler

Akira Yamaguchi Professor of Environmental Health and Human Habitation, Department of environmental Health, Harvard Chan T.H. School of Public Health

Seminar Title:  New Perspectives on Urban Heat

Seminar Summary:  We all recognize that our cities are getting hotter but is our science informing important stakeholders and decision makers, such as designers, landscape architects, urban planners and public health officials?  This presentation will share recent findings on extreme heat, sleep, cognitive function and health in different populations and settings.  The speakers also describe how a newly developed planning tool that predicts the thermal experience of people can account for natural and building elements to better design public places now and in the future.

Speaker Bios: John Spengler is the Akira Yamaguchi Professor of Environmental Health and Human Habitation and Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  He has conducted research in the areas of personal monitoring, air pollution health effects, indoor air pollution, and a variety of environmental sustainability issues.  Several of his investigations have focused on housing design and its effects on ventilation rates, building materials’ selection, energy consumption, and total environmental quality in homes. Spengler chaired the committee on Harvard Sustainability Principles; served on Harvard’s Greenhouse Gases Taskforce to develop the University’s carbon reduction goals and strategies; and was a member of Harvard’s Greenhouse Gases Executive Committee. He has served on several National Academies’ committees, including the NRC committee on “Green Schools: Attributes for Health and Learning” (Chair) and the IOM committee on “Effect of Climate Change on Indoor Air Quality and Public Health” (Chair), and has been an advisor to the World Health Organization on indoor air pollution, personal exposure and air pollution epidemiology.  In 2003, Spengler received a Heinz Award for the Environment; in 2007, the Air & Waste Management Association Lyman Ripperton Environmental Educator Award; in 2008, the Max von Pettenkofer Award for distinguished contributions in indoor air science from the International Society of Indoor Air Quality & Climate’s Academy of Fellows; and in 2015, the ASHRAE Environmental Health Award.

Memo Cedeño, ScD is a research associate in the Department of Environmental Health at the Chan School of Public Health. His research focuses on the ways in which climate change might modify indoor environmental exposures and how to avoid their harmful health effects.  He is also interested in developing and using new sensor networks to improve exposure characterization.

Augusta Williams, MPH is a third-year ScD student in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the intersection of climate change, public health, and the built environment. She is interested in utilizing exposure assessment and epidemiology to assess equitable and sustainable climate change adaptation strategies.

Readings

Jianxiang Huang, Jose Guillermo Cedeno-Laurent, and John D. Spengler. 2014. CityComfort+: A simulation-based method for predicting mean radiant temperature in dense urban areas.Building and Environment. N 80: 84-95.

Wu CD, McNeely E, Cedeño-Laurent JG, Pan WC, Adamkiewicz G, Dominici F, Lung SC, Su HJ, Spengler JD. 2014. Linking student performance in Massachusetts elementary schools with the “greenness” of school surroundings using remote sensing.

PLoS One. 2014 Oct 13;9(10):e108548. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0108548.

September 29:

Speaker:  Anthony Janetos

Director and Frederick S. Pardee Professor,

Professor of Earth and Environment, Boston University

Seminar Title:  Resilience in BU’s Climate Action Plan

Seminar Summary: The seminar will discuss how we have treated the concept of resilience in the recommendations of BU’s Climate Action Plan Task Force.  It will link current and potential vulnerabilities to decisions that we have recommended that the University take.

Speaker Bio: Prof. Janetos has devoted his career to high-impact global change science and policy, earning international recognition for his scholarship and holding executive leadership positions at institutions including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, World Resources Institute, and the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. He has written and spoken widely on the need to understand the scientific, environmental, economic, and policy linkages among the major global environmental issues, and he has served on several national and international study teams, including working as a co-chair of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change.  In addition to his research interests in the interaction of land systems with human needs and climate change, he has been an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Lead Author and Coordinating Lead Author, and has served on multiple National Research Council Committees and Boards.

October 6:

Speaker:  Carl Spector, MA, Commissioner of the Environment, City of Boston

Seminar Title:  Climate Adaptation in Boston

Seminar Summary:  In December 2016, Mayor Martin Walsh released the report Climate Ready Boston. The City of Boston is now working to implement its recommendations and integrate adaptation with programs for economic development, public health, transportation improvement, and much more. Equally important is coordination with other levels of government and private organizations as well as engagement with the public.

Speaker Bio:  Carl Spector is Commissioner of the Environment for the City of Boston. He oversees programs related to climate mitigation and adaptation, environmental protection, historic preservation, and other aspects of sustainability. Before joining Boston City Hall in 2005, Carl worked on a wide variety of environmental and energy issues for the federal government and in private industry.  He holds degrees in physics and environmental science.

Readings: Climate Ready Boston website and Climate Ready Boston report

October 13:

Speaker:  Tiffany Skogstrom, MPH

Outreach and Policy Coordinator

Building Chemical Safety into Climate Change Resiliency Project

Massachusetts Office of Technical Assistance (OTA)

Seminar Title:  Building Chemical Safety into Climate Change Adaptation Planning

Seminar Summary: Heat waves, flooding, intense storms, power outages and other climate change weather events pose a significant threat to communities where large toxic chemical users reside when critical infrastructure and services fail or are damaged.  Tiffany Skogstrom will demonstrate a the Office of Technical Assistance’s (OTA) online mapping tool to identify toxics users in relation to climate change-related vulnerability factors such as flood and hurricane, as well as environmental justice areas.

Reading:  The map and more information about the OTA initiative, can be found at www.mass.gov/eea/ota-climate.

October 20:

Speaker:  Kristie Ebi, PhD, MS, MPH

Rohm & Haas Endowed Professorship in Public Health Sciences

Professor of Global Health and Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington

Seminar Title:  Managing the Manageable: Health Risks of Climate Change (Note: This seminar will be viewed online in the classroom)

Seminar Summary: Climate change exacerbates current and creates new climate-sensitive health risks, with the magnitude and pattern of risks over the next few decades dependent on proactive building of climate-resilient health systems.  Health systems have long-standing policies and programs to address climate-sensitive health outcomes, but only recently started to explicitly incorporate the potential consequences of a changing climate, with low- and middle-income countries leading the way.  Lessons learned and best practices in health adaptation will be discussed.

Speaker Bio:  Kristie L. Ebi is the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professorship in Public Health Sciences and she been conducting research and practice on the health risks of climate variability and change for twenty years.  Her research focuses on the impacts of and adaptation to climate variability and change, including on extreme events, thermal stress, foodborne safety and security, and vectorborne diseases.  She focuses on understanding sources of vulnerability, estimating current and future health risks of climate change, and designing adaptation policies and measures to reduce the risks of climate change in multi-stressor environments.  She has supported multiple countries in Central America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific in assessing their vulnerability and implementing adaptation measures, in collaboration with WHO, UNDP, USAID, and others. She also is co-chair with Tom Kram (PBL, The Netherlands) of the International Committee On New Integrated Climate change assessjment Scenarios (ICONICS), facilitating development of new climate change scenarios.  Dr. Ebi’s scientific training includes an M.S. in toxicology and a Ph.D. and a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology, and two years of postgraduate research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  She has edited fours books on aspects of climate change and has more than 180 publications.

Readings:

Ebi KL, Otmani del Barrio M. 2017. Lessons learned on health adaptation to climate variability and change: experiences across low- and middle-income countries. Environmental Health Perspectives.

October 27

Speaker:  Anne L. Kelly, JD

Senior Program Director, Public Policy, Ceres

Director, Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy [BICEP], Ceres

Seminar Title:  How Businesses are Promoting Climate Change Policy

Seminar Summary:  This seminar examines how businesses, alone and with the assistance of NGOs such as Ceres are working to promote climate and clean energy policy at the state, federal, and global levels. Ms. Kelly will discuss how, as a lobbyist, she represents companies seeking to promote climate change policy on Capitol Hill.

Speaker Bio: Anne Kelly is senior director of the policy program at Ceres, a nonprofit advocacy organization that mobilizes investor and business leadership to build a more sustainable global economy. She also directs Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP), a coalition of 41 leading companies seeking to advocate for meaningful climate and energy policy at the federal level. Kelly is a registered lobbyist, engaged on Capitol Hill on behalf of Ceres and BICEP member companies. An environmental lawyer with 20 years of experience in the public and private sectors, she has worked as special assistant to the EPA Region I administrator and serves on the board of the Environmental League of Massachusetts.

November 3

Speaker:  Frank Ackerman, PhD

Principal Economist, Synapse Energy Economics

Seminar Title:  Worst Case Economics: Extreme Events in Climate and Finance

Seminar Summary: Public policy toward climate and financial risks is often based on a simplistic economics that minimizes or dismisses threats of extreme events. Yet the extremes are what people worry most about. What does it take to create effective responses to worst-case risks, in both climate protection and financial regulation?

Speaker Bio: Frank Ackerman is an environmental economist who has written widely on energy, climate change, and related issues, he is well known for his critiques of overly narrow cost-benefit analyses of environmental protection, among other topics. He has directed studies and reports for clients ranging from Greenpeace to the European Parliament, including many state agencies, international organizations, and leading environmental groups. His books include Climate Change and Global Equity (2014), Climate Economics: The State of the Art (2013), Can We Afford the Future? (2009), and Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing (2004). His latest book, Worst Case Economics: Extreme Events in Climate and Finance, will be available in late 2017.

From 1995 to 2007 Dr. Ackerman worked at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE).  From 2007 through 2012 he was at the Stockholm Environment Institute’s U.S. Center, also at Tufts University, where he directed the Climate Economics Group.  Since 2012 he has been a principal economist at Synapse Energy Economics, a public interest-oriented consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2014-2015, he was a lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching graduate seminars on Electricity, Economics and the Environment, and Climate Economics and Policy. In 2017, he is also a research fellow at Boston University’s Global Economics Governance Institute, collaborating in research on trade and the environment.

Readings:

Ackerman, F. 2015 Review of two recent books:  Combating climate change, by the books by Nicholas Stern and This changes everything by Naomi Klein. Climate Policy.

Ackerman, F. 2008. Climate economics in four easy pieces. Development.51.325-331.

November 10:  No Seminar

November 15: 

Speakers: 

Aaron Cohen, DSc, MPH

Consulting Scientist, Health Effects Institute (HEI), Boston

Affiliate Professor of Global Health, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington.

Patrick Kinney, ScD  

Beverly Brown Professor of Urban Health

Department of Environmental Health, BUSPH

Seminar Title:  Air Pollution and Mortality in China: Results of Recent Cohort Studies

Seminar Summary:  The Global Burden of Disease project recently estimated that long-term exposure to ambient fine particles – PM2.5 –was the fourth leading risk factor for mortality in China in 2015, after high blood pressure, high sodium diet and tobacco smoking (GBD 2015 Risk Factor Collaborators The Lancet  2016; Cohen AJ et al. The Lancet 2017).  These estimates were based on extrapolating the results of cohort studies in high-income North America and Europe, absent direct evidence from Chinese studies. But with the advent of the Chinese nationwide PM2.5 air pollution monitoring network in 2013 and the availability of satellite-based estimates, new cohort studies are now being conducted. This seminar will present the results of two such studies conducted with Chinese collaborators.  

Speaker Bios:

Aaron J Cohen is Consulting Scientist at the Health Effects Institute (HEI) in Boston, MA. Prior to his retirement from HEI in May 2016 Dr. Cohen led for 26 years HEI’s US and international epidemiologic research programs on the adverse effects of air pollution. Past HEI responsibilities included the organization and management of epidemiologic research projects such as the Reanalysis of the American Cancer Society and Six-City studies of air pollution and mortality, and multi- city time-series studies of air pollution and daily mortality in Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America. He led HEI’s 2004 and 2010 reviews of the literature on the health effects of air pollution in the developing countries of Asia, and initiated, and currently co-coordinates, HEI’s Health Outcomes Research program, which assesses the health impacts of actions taken to improve air quality. Since 1999 Dr. Cohen has served as a Temporary Advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) on the evaluation of epidemiologic evidence, air pollution health impact assessment, and air quality guideline development and has served as a member of International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) working groups on diesel exhaust and outdoor air pollution. He co-chaired the Expert Groups that produced estimates of the global burden of disease due to Urban Air Pollution in 2000 and Ambient Air Pollution for the Global Burden of Disease 2010 project and is a member of the Core Analytic Team of the Global Burden of Disease project.  Epidemiology is Dr. Cohen’s second career. He is also a Registered Respiratory Therapist (AS and BS, Northeastern University), and worked for 15 years in newborn intensive care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and subsequently as Research Associate in Perinatal Epidemiology, conducting epidemiologic and clinical research on neonatal respiratory disease, and the evaluation of related medical technologies.  Dr. Cohen holds a D.Sc. in Epidemiology (1991), and Masters in Public Health (1985) from the Boston University School of Public Health, where he is adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Health. He is also Affiliate Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Patrick Kinney is the Beverly A. Brown Professor of Urban Health and Sustainability at Boston University.  His teaching and research address issues at the intersection of global environmental change, human health, and policy, with an emphasis on the public health impacts of climate change and air pollution. At BU, Dr. Kinney’s work focuses on assessing health impacts of air pollution and climate extremes in cities, and the health and climate co-benefits that can be achieved through carefully-planned mitigation and adaptation strategies. Dr. Kinney earned his doctorate at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he studied the effects of air pollution on lung function among children as part of the Harvard Six Cities Air Pollution and Health Study.

November 24:  No Seminar

December 1

Speakers: Seyoung Chloe Chung and Lindsey Butler 

Doctoral Students, Department of Environmental Health, BUSPH

Seminar Title (Chloe): The Impact of Aviation Emissions on Ultrafine Particle (UFP) Concentrations in Communities at Varying Distances from Flight Paths

Seminar Summary: Communities living near airports are potentially affected by increased exposures to aviation-related emissions, such as ultrafine particles (UFPs), due to the high emission rates from aircraft as well as concentrated flight paths.  Multiple studies have shown aircraft arrivals’ contribution to ambient UFP concentrations over large regions, but few studies have had the necessary monitoring infrastructure to accurately evaluate the magnitude and spatial extent of its impact. Traffic-related UFPs have a strong temporal and spatial variation and are known to decrease as a function of distance from roadways. However, the dispersion patterns of UFPs emitted from arrival aircraft are not yet well understood. Our study was designed to better answer some of the questions related to arrival aircraft plume dynamics and its impact on ambient UFP concentrations by utilizing data with high temporal and spatial resolution. In this study, we collected real-time UFP and BC measurements along with local meteorological data from April to September of 2017 at six monitoring sites that are at varying distances from Boston Logan International Airport and from one of the major arrival flight paths (4R) to Logan. In addition, real-time 3-D flight location data (latitude, longitude, and altitude) were obtained from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the purpose of source attribution. Our study results can be used to evaluate the impact of aircraft arrivals’ impact on population exposures.

December 8:  No Seminar

December 15

Speakers: Komal Basra

Doctoral Student, Department of Environmental Health, BUSPH

Seminar Title: Lead in backyard chicken eggs: A preliminary analysis of risk and predictors