Environmental Health Scientist
Recent News
Here is a smattering of recent writing, publications, and podcasts.
Two recent articles featured as cover stories
Release of new product:
Daily 10km-10km estimated ambient wildfire-specific PM2.5 concentrations
Led by Marissa Childs (now Harvard), we have now released a novel dataset of daily wildfire-specific ambient PM2.5 concentrations across the contiguous US from 2006-2020. We develop a parsimonious machine learning model of daily wildfire specific PM2.5 concentrations using a combination of ground, satellite, and reanalysis data sources that are easy to update. The number of people in locations with at least 1 day of smoke PM2.5 above 100 μg/m3 per year has increased 27-fold over the last decade, including nearly 25 million people in 2020 alone.
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Link to article in Environmental Science & Technology.
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Select coverage:
Interview with local Spanish news channel about wildfire exposures and behaviors
I was interviewed about our recent article (below) on exposures and behavioral responses to wildfire smoke by a local Spanish news channel on what we found and how people -- especially those with more limited financial resources -- can protect themselves against the negative effects of wildfire smoke.
Article on wildfire smoke salience, changes to sentiment, and indoor air pollution
Using data private Purple Air pollution sensors, cell phones, social media posts and internet search activity, we show that, when wildfire smoke plumes are overhead, Americans increase their Google searches for wildfire-smoke related terms in English and Spanish across the income gradient. However, sentiment is reduced and searches for air purifiers are increased moreso in wealthier areas. Furthermore, we also show that during wildfire smoke events indoor air pollution concentrations are regularly well-above health-based guidelines are vary dramatically among neighboring households.
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Coverage
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Article on multidimensional gender inequality in energy services in India
Our study led by Professor Alice Tianbo Zhang at Washington & Lee University was recently published in Nature energy. By cleverly surveying both man and women household heads (spouses), we seek to understand the relationship between women's empowerment and awareness and use of energy services. Women in less empowered households are less aware of energy services and use less electricity than their spouses as compared to women in more empowered households.
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Coverage
Advice for early career scientists from Black and Latina researchers
Together with my good friend and colleague Professor Daniel Carrión at Yale University, I had the chance to interview three researchers in environmental health and environmental justice to learn from their experiences and hopefully provide some useful advice to other junior scientists. The essay truly was formed out of dozens of conversations Prof. Carrión and I have had over the years trying to figure out what it means to be successful in academia, how to be successful and stay true to ourselves, and how to confront the various challenges we face as Latinos studying environmental health and EJ. This essay surely misses a number of important topics and could have been way longer, but we hope it's useful to some.
Essay on household energy and poverty
In this essay for Environmental health news, I reflect on my experiences researching household air pollution and the use of polluting cooking fuels and its inextricable relationship with poverty.
Review article on the environmental correlates of Covid-19 susceptibility, infection, and severity
In this article published in the Annual review of public health we summarize a number of mechanisms through which environmental factors -- we focus on air pollution, chemical exposures, climate, and the built environment -- might be affecting the pandemic. Namely, we outline four proposed overlapping mechanisms: (1) exacerbating comorbidities and respiratory conditions associated with severe COVID-19; (2) modifying susceptibility to infection and/or severe disease through immune response modification; (3) regulating viral survival and transport; and (4) altering behavioral patterns that determine the frequency and intensity of exposures to the virus. I'm grateful to Professor Justin Remais for inviting me to join this group and to Mandy Weaver for leading the work!
