Personal Air Pollution Exposures
Traffic-related air pollution
Traffic is one of the major sources of air pollution, especially in urban areas. Intra-city traveling can involve private, public, and shared options, physically active and non-active options, as well as combinations of mode types. Changes in urban mobility can potentially alter numerous population health determinants through physical activity levels, stress, access to resources, transportation-related costs, and time, as well as exposures to air pollution, noise, and other environmental stressors. My studies exploit mixture of methods to understand:
Acute health impact of personal air pollution exposure Most epidemiological studies use ambient pollutant concentrations at residential locations as the surrogate of personal environmental pollution exposure. However, people move in time and space. Ignoring time-activity patterns and human mobility introduces exposure misclassification in environmental epidemiological studies. My studies exploit portable and wearable sensors to understand:
|
Ambient Air Pollution
Ambient air is a complex mixture from diverse sources. Based on 2017 global estimates, ambient air pollution is attributable to 147 (95%CI: 132-162) million disability-adjusted life-years, and is the fifth-ranked environmental risk factor attributable to global burden of diseases in East Asia.
I use time-series, case-crossover and also cohort designs and collect health information from hospital records, electronic health records, as well as direct measurements from subjects, in order to assess both long-term and short-term health effects of ambient air pollution on cardiovascular event, respiratory diseases, birth outcomes and diabetes. I am also interested in short-term health effect of wildfire smoke among the general population. I have led an health impact assessment of PM2.5 attributable mortality from the 2020 Washington wildfire smoke episode, and have estimated the avoided deaths under existing intervention strategies. |