Extreme Heat - Why Should I Care? An Earth Conversation

Katharine is the Co-Director and Founding Executive Director of the Initiative on Cities, where she spearheads university-wide programs and research, including the Menino Survey of Mayors, experiential learning for students and multi-stakeholder conferences, and supports a number of federally funded research projects devoted to smart cities and the urban environment. She is a champion for urban research and education across Boston University, serving on the advisory boards of the BU URBAN interdisciplinary doctoral program, the City Planning & Urban Affairs program, the  Institute for Sustainable Energy, BU Spark!, the Data Science for Good (DS4G) Initiative and the Urban Climate Initiative.

Lucy Hutyra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and  Environment at Boston University.  She received her PhD in Earth and  Planetary Sciences in 2007 from Harvard University for her thesis  “Carbon and Water Exchange in Amazonian Rain Forests.” Her research uses principles from a number of different scientific fields to understand the terrestrial carbon cycle and the impact of humans on carbon pools and fluxes. Through integration of atmospheric, biometric, and climatological information, she is focused on understanding the characteristics and drivers of atmosphere-biosphere exchange of carbon and water.

Ian Sue Wing is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University, a research affiliate of the Centers for Energy & Environmental Studies and Transportation Studies at BU, the Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a 2005-6 REPSOL-YPF Energy Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He holds a PhD in Technology, Management & Policy from MIT and a MSc in economics from Oxford University, where he was the 1994 Commonwealth Caribbean Rhodes Scholar. Sue Wing conducts research and teaching on the economic analysis of energy and environmental policy, with an emphasis on climate change and computational general equilibrium (CGE) analysis of economies’ adjustment to policy shocks. His current research includes investigation of the impacts at the state and regional level of current U.S. proposals to mitigate climate change, sources of long-run change in the energy intensity of the U.S. economy, the theoretical and empirical analysis of induced technological change, the long-run effects of trade-mediated international productivity spillovers for global carbon emissions and leakage, and the implications of different methods of representing endogenous technological change in CGE models for climate change policy analysis. He has been supported by grants from the California Energy Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and has been a member of advisory panels for the DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Research Council.

Dr. Scammell is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health at Boston University School of Public Health. In 2017 she received an Outstanding New Environmental Scientist (ONES) award from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences/National Institutes of Health, and currently leads two longitudinal cohort studies in El Salvador and Nicaragua examining environmental and occupational risk factors of chronic kidney disease. Known in the region as Mesoamerican Nephropathy, or Chronic Kidney Disease of unknown etiology, it is a leading case of death in young men and the cause has yet to be determined. One exposure studied by Dr. Scammell in both Central America and locally is extreme heat and heat stress. Dr. Scammell is co-Principal Investigator of the Chelsea East Boston Heat Study (C-HEAT)—funded by the Barr Foundation–examining indoor and ambient experience of heat by residents of two urban heat islands and environmental justice communities. This work is in partnership with GreenRoots, Inc, Chelsea where Dr. Scammell serves of the board of directors. She also Chairs the board of directors of the national Science & Environmental Health Network. Dr. Scammell teaches PH 801, Community-Engaged Research: Theory, Methods and Applications at BUSPH.

Dr. Greg Wellenius is Professor of Environmental Health at the BU School of Public Health and Director of the BUSPH Program on Climate and Health. His research is focused on understanding the impacts of continued climate change on people’s health and wellbeing and evaluating the health benefits of potential solutions.