The 18th Annual Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture
Hosted by the Center for Global Change Science and Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT
Francesca Dominici, PhD
Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science, HSPH
Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative
How much evidence do you need? Data Science to Inform Environmental Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic
On December 7, 2020, the New York Times reported that President Trump declined to tighten soot rules. This was despite strong evidence of the adverse health effects including a link to COVID-19 deaths. In this talk, I will provide an overview of data science methods, including methods for causal inference and machine learning, to inform environmental policy. This is based on my work analyzing a data platform of unprecedented size and representativeness. The platform includes more than 500 million observations on the health experience of over 95% of the US population older than 65 years old linked to air pollution exposure and several confounders. Finally, I provide an overview of my studies on air pollution exposure, environmental racism, wildfires, and how they also can exacerbate the vulnerability to COVID-19.
Wednesday, April 21, 4:00 – 5:30pm ET | Event Website
