New faculty explore environmental impacts on health from different angles
October 23, 2024 – New faculty members appointed to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health are studying how environmental factors impact health from a variety of angles, including potential harms from “toxin cocktails,” microbes in engineered water systems, and climate-related extreme weather events.
The new faculty members include Peng Gao, assistant professor of environmental health and exposomics, who starts on Nov. 15; Hannah Healy, assistant professor of environmental health and exposure science, who begins Jan. 1; and Amruta Nori-Sarma, assistant professor of environmental health and population science, whose first day at the School was Oct. 15.
Another new faculty member is Mary Rice, who began work Oct. 1 as the new director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE) and as the Mark and Catherine Winkler Associate Professor of Environmental Respiratory Health. Rice, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has spent her career treating patients with chronic lung disease whose health is most at risk from air pollution from burning fossil fuels. Her research focuses on the impact of environmental exposures, especially air pollution and climate change, on the respiratory health of children and adults.
Rice’s appointment was announced Sept. 18 in an announcement from Dean Andrea Baccarelli and in a C-CHANGE press release.
Assessing exposomes
Gao comes to Harvard Chan School from the University of Pittsburgh, where he has been an assistant professor with appointments in both the School of Public Health and the Swanson School of Engineering. While earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry, he was involved in work analyzing pollutants both in environmental samples such as drinking water, and in biological samples such as urine or tissue. The work got him increasingly interested in the field of environmental health.
Gao now focuses his research on the “exposome”—the measure of an individual’s total environmental exposures over the course of their life, and how those exposures impact health. In particular, Gao has focused on environmental influences on various respiratory diseases, such as asthma and lung cancer.
He called the thousands of chemicals and microbes that people are exposed to simultaneously a “toxin cocktail” and said it’s crucial to study the collective risk they pose. “We have to focus on how they interact with each other and how they contribute as a group to chronic disease,” he said.
One of Gao’s major research projects involves assessing the extent and potential health impacts of chemical contamination in East Palestine, Ohio, where a February 2023 train derailment spilled a slew of hazardous chemicals onto the ground that leached into nearby waterways. “After we analyze water and soil samples to find all the contaminants, we will do a comprehensive risk assessment,” he said. The project was one of six that received funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in February 2024 to conduct research in the wake of the derailment.
Favorite hobby: A cappella singing
Favorite movies: The Marvel series
‘Clean drinking water is a human right’
Healy, currently working as a postdoc in Yale University’s Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, conducts field work, lab work, and analytical research on microbes such as bacteria and fungi that grow in a variety of niches in the built environment, and studies their impact on health. She became interested in the field during the summer of her freshman year in college, when she worked on a farm in a remote part of Panama. Water treatment on the farm was inadequate and the residents routinely got sick. She recalled thinking, “‘I want to learn how to prevent this.’ Access to clean drinking water is a basic human right.”
There are millions of bacteria in every glass of water we drink, Healy said. Most are harmless, but some can cause serious illness. Such microbes can grow in spots such as sink drains, water pipes, and sanitation systems. One study Healy co-authored, for example, found that, in some large buildings that were closed during the pandemic, water samples contained Legionella pneumophila—a bacteria that has been linked with water stagnation and that causes Legionnaires’ disease, a serious type of pneumonia that can sometimes be fatal.
Healy said she is also interested in studying standing water in urban areas as a source of Legionella. Studies have shown strong correlations between Legionnaires’ and heavy rains, with outbreaks occurring about two weeks afterwards. “The thought is that when cars drive over these puddles and splash in them, that’s enough to aerosolize the water, and then people can be exposed by breathing in the aerosol,” she explained. She is also studying the potential spread of Legionnaires’ from sink drains. “If you turn on the sink, some of the water aerosolizes,” she said, “and whatever’s in it can reach you, or can land on nearby surfaces that you might touch.”
Favorite hobby: Reading science fiction
Book series she’d recommend: The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemison. “It’s a fantasy and science fiction and post-apocalyptic. It has a lot of wonderful themes that tie into environmental justice.”
Extreme weather and vulnerable groups
Nori-Sarma, previously an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), can’t remember a time when she wasn’t interested in climate change. She grew up in a small town in North Carolina where she experienced hurricanes on a regular basis, which got her thinking about climate patterns. Her interest was further piqued during a high school summer internship with the Environmental Protection Agency, working with a researcher studying how diesel particulates affect human health. “I always had an awareness that the way you can really have people care about environmental exposures is by talking about how they impact health—making that connection so that it’s not just an abstract,” she said.
Nori-Sarma’s current work is focused on understanding the impact of climate change-driven extreme weather events on vulnerable populations—particularly the impacts on mental health. One of her projects is looking at mental health emergencies associated with extreme heat in the Boston area using data from the Boston Emergency Services Team (BEST), which provides psychiatric emergency services to publicly insured and uninsured patients in greater Boston. “What we’re seeing is that as summertime temperatures are increasing, there’s a direct increase in the need for psychiatric emergency services among these patients, and the increases in the rates of emergency department visits that we’re observing are higher than what we see among people with private health insurance, who tend to have relatively higher socioeconomic status and more means to protect themselves,” she said.
Nori-Sarma is also one of three principal investigators on a joint initiative from Harvard Chan School and BUSPH aimed at spurring research on climate and health. The BUSPH-HSPH CAFÉ Research Coordinating Center, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is aimed at creating a global community of practice at the nexus of climate and health by providing access to data, fostering research collaborations, organizing conferences, and providing training.
Book she’d recommend: Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder, about Jim O’Connell, head of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.
Favorite hobby: Traveling. “My goal was to travel to 40 countries before turning 40. I’m almost there.”
Photos courtesy Mary Rice, Peng Gao, Hannah Healy, Amruta Nori-Sarma
