Environmental & Public Health

Kotzebue is an Alaskan city located on a sound bordering the Chukchi Sea, about 30 miles above the Arctic Circle. The city features the Nullaġvik Hotel, a number of B&B’s, several churches, and a restaurant called Little Louie’s that serves breakfast burritos and nachos. About 70 percent of the 3,500 residents are Iñupiat Eskimo, and native traditions hold strong too.

If anyone knows where to find refuge from air pollution near Los Angeles freeways, it’s Suzanne Paulson. The UCLA atmospheric chemistry professor has spent years studying how invisible plumes of dirty air from car- and truck-choked roadways spread into surrounding neighborhoods — increasing residents’ risk of cancer, asthma, heart disease and other illnesses.

“Climate change will increase the global burden of infectious diseases such as malaria, Zika and Lyme disease,” says 2017 Fellow Dev Vashishtha. “We are also seeing changes in pollen patterns and increases in asthma diagnoses. We know that the poor and people of color will be the hardest hit. My interest in climate change is closely tied to my interest in public health and disease prevention.”

As farmers battle in their above-ground war on weeds, they may inadvertently create underground casualties – unintentionally attacking the beneficial bacteria that help crops guard against enemy fungus, according to Cornell University research. Specifically, Cornell researchers found negative consequences of the weed-killing herbicide glyphosate on Pseudomonas, a soil-friendly bacteria.

In the heart of car-dominated Los Angeles, a group of students set out on a journey to discover what it takes to create bike-friendly cities. The result is an inspiring call to action for people everywhere.

Fellow Ayana Johnson says after a natural disaster (strengthened by our warmer planet) is exactly the time to talk about environmental conservation. It protects lives and property, and makes places like Puerto Rico far more self-reliant when disaster strikes.

The sun is strong, the sky Hollywood-set blue, but the wind is brutal. This is confounding the work of Wade Elmer, chief scientist for the Department of Plant Pathology and Ecology at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. At the CAES farm in Hamden, he and a small contingent of grad students, lab assistants, and other researchers are busy transplanting eggplant seedlings and chasing empty seed containers across the blustery, one-tenth of an acre that Elmer likes to call the “death bed.”

With tens of thousands of people displaced and many billions of dollars in estimated damages from the impacts of Hurricane Harvey, an environmental group on Tuesday filed a formal request on Tuesday to discover why the Trump administration recently decided to lift flood zone restrictions designed to mitigate these kinds of costly disasters.