News & Research

The Harvard Business School’s Climate Rising Podcast for business and policy leaders discusses what businesses are doing, can do, and should do to confront climate change.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the power to change medicine and public health for the better, improving everything from diagnostics to treatment decisions to healthcare access, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Andrew Beam. But there’s also a need to proceed with caution in using this powerful tool, he said.

Working from home has its perks: Better coffee, easy commute, no fluorescent lighting. But, as any home office worker can tell you, there are also downsides: No more office social hours, no more ergonomic chairs, and no more quiet train rides to catch up on your podcasts. In this episode of the Better Off podcast, we’ll ask: Is working from home good or bad for our health?

Whether it’s creating products and services that intentionally benefit women, make life better for everyone, or transform an industry, women leaders in the Harvard  i-lab community continue to inspire us.

February, 2023 – Humans are exposed to increasingly complex mixtures of hormone-disrupting chemicals from a variety of sources, yet, traditional research methods only evaluate a small number of chemicals at a time. The study aimed to advance novel methods to investigate exposures amongst to complex chemical mixtures amongst office workers.

The average person in the US spends roughly 90% of their life indoors, according to Harvard researchers Joseph Allen and John Macomber, authors of Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Can Make You Sick―or Keep You Well. It’s a statistic that took on new weight over the past few years of Covid, as we collectively reconsidered the mental and physical health implications of our built environment—and one that feels especially salient right now, as more employees are returning to office buildings and employers are rethinking what those buildings look like.

The Covid-19 pandemic has increased pressures for companies to ensure workspaces are better ventilated. But eco-friendly design guidelines call for ensuring that energy heating or cooling such spaces isn not wasted. Are healthy and green building principles in conflict? They don’t have to be. Several actions, such as regular building tune-ups, filters, air-quality monitoring, and electrification, can lead to progress on one front without diminishing it on the other.

November 9, 2022 – Equipping offices with “healthier” furnishings could reduce human exposure to risky PFAS chemicals, new research suggests. To look at indoor PFAS levels, a team led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in Boston, analyzed building dust in classrooms and common campus spaces.

October 27, 2022 – Environmental health expert Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard, explains why people should demand more from their schools and offices.