Environmental & Public Health

Juan Reynoso is only the second person to have completed a new joint Master in Public Health (M.P.H.)/Master in Urban Planning (M.U.P.) degree program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). The program allows students to pursue a transdisciplinary education in urban planning and public health and sharpen their understanding of key areas including policy, sustainability, and social determinants of health.

For people who live or work close to major roadways, air pollution — particularly ultrafine particles from vehicle exhaust — can pose a serious health threat. In this episode, Christina Fuller, an environmental epidemiologist and assistant professor in the School of Public Health, discusses her research on ultrafine particles in metro Atlanta and the role that trees may play in protecting urban residents.

Universities, cities, and now even some countries are starting to phase out single-use plastics, but what will they switch to? Tons of disposable foodware, including products made from agricultural waste and labeled compostable, are used and discarded every day. Some of the products contain chemicals that are associated with adverse health effects such as hormone disruption, increased cholesterol levels, and increased risk of cancer. Ideally, we should phase out single-use plastics and encourage the development of alternatives that are manufactured with and contain inherently safer chemicals. How do we incentivize a transition to the best reusable products?

The federal government had the foresight and mechanisms in place to minimize the risk of pandemics to human health. However, the Trump administration is placing the nation at risk by systematically undermining these structures and experts associated with them, writes Fellow Laura Meyerson.

For more than three years, the Trump administration has prided itself on working with industry to unshackle companies from burdensome environmental regulations. But as the Environmental Protection Agency prepares to finalize the latest in a long line of rollbacks, the nation’s power sector has sent a different message:

In cities around the country, if you want to understand the history of a neighborhood, you might want to do the same thing you'd do to measure human health: Check its temperature. That's what a group of researchers did, and they found that neighborhoods with higher temperatures were often the same ones subjected to discriminatory, race-based housing practices nearly a century ago.