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Yale Alumni Academy Climate Change Conversations | Climate Epidemiology: How to Assess Health Impacts of Climate Change

Yale Alumni Academy and the Yale School of the Environment have assembled a distinguished roster of expert faculty to address the leading climate change issues facing our wonderous planet. Please join us as we discuss Climate Epidemiology: How to Access the Health Impacts of Climate Change with Dr. Kai Chen. With the record-breaking hot summer in 2023 and extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and wildfires raging across the world, one has to wonder: what are the health impacts of these climate change-related events? Leveraging multidisciplinary approaches and collaborations, a new field of climate epidemiology has emerged to answer this question. In this Climate Change Conversation, we will discuss how to connect the dots between climate change and public health, using examples from recent work at the Climate, Health, and Environment Nexus (CHEN) Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

To register for more events during the Yale Alumni Academy Climate Change Conversation series please visit our website.

Speaker

Dr. Kai Chen, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, YSPH

Dr. Kai Chen

Dr. Kai Chen is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and serves as the Director of Research at the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health. He is the Principal Investigator of the Climate, Health, and Environment Nexus (CHEN) Lab. Prior to joining Yale in July 2019, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoc Fellow at Helmholtz Zentrum München-German Center for Environmental Health. Dr. Chen is an environmental epidemiologist who focuses on the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health. His work involves applying multidisciplinary approaches - from climate and air pollution sciences to exposure assessment and environmental epidemiology - to investigate the impacts of climate change on human health. Dr. Chen investigates how ambient temperature and extreme weather events (e.g., drought, floods, wildfires) can affect mortality and morbidity from a comprehensive spectrum of diseases, including myocardial infarction, kidney disease, childhood diarrhea, birth outcomes, unintentional injuries, and mental disorders. He also assesses the adverse health effects of air pollution and their interactions with extreme temperatures from a local to global scale under a changing climate.

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