Plenary Speakers
C. Arden Pope, III (Brigham Young University, USA)
C. Arden Pope, III, is a Professor of Economics and Karl G. Maeser Distinguished University Professor at Brigham Young University. He received a PhD from Iowa State University, was a Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians. He has conducted and collaborated on seminal studies on the health effects of air pollution. He has advised numerous scientific boards and committees and received multiple research and teaching awards. Recently, he co-authored a book with Douglas W. Dockery, Particles of Truth: A Story of Discovery, Controversy, and the Fight for Healthy Air (MIT Press, 2025). This book presents a compelling story of air pollution science, documenting the substantial public health benefits of clean, healthy air. The book also addresses persistent efforts to cast doubt on air pollution research and discredit public policy initiatives aimed at protecting air quality.
One promise of air pollution epidemiology is that it can provide essential information on the health effects of air pollution, supporting evidence-based public policies aimed at safeguarding air quality and public health. Over the past several decades, evidence has accumulated, indicating that the health impacts of fine particulate air pollution are greater than initially expected. Air pollution is now recognized as a leading risk factor for disease and death. However, the work of air pollution epidemiology is not yet complete. It faces at least two sets of ongoing challenges. The first set of challenges includes methodological issues such as difficulties in estimating human exposures and relying on observational data in real-world environments without experimental control. Advances, including improved exposure assessment, natural experiments, quasi-experimental approaches, and causal modeling methods, have significantly contributed to increasingly rigorous air pollution epidemiology. These advances have strengthened the evidence that air pollution impacts human health. The second set of challenges relates to efforts to cast doubt on scientific results that support public policies aimed at protecting air quality. The validity of environmental epidemiology is challenged by characterizing it as “junk science”, “secret science”, or “advocacy science”. Dan Greenbaum understood that the efficacy of using air pollution epidemiology to inform public policy depends on adeptly, collaboratively, and civilly addressing both sets of challenges.
- Sunday, August 17, 2025
- 16:15 – 16:45
Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou (Brown University, USA)
Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou is a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Brown School of Public Health and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. She earned her environmental engineering degree from the Democritus University of Thrace in Greece, her Master of Science in Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her Doctor of Science in Environmental Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research focuses on applied statistical issues in environmental epidemiology, including quantifying and correcting for exposure measurement error, propagating exposure prediction uncertainty, and assessing high-dimensional and complex exposures in health analyses. Her work primarily examines climate-related exposures, such as temperature, wildfires, air pollution, and tropical cyclones, and how associated health risks vary across neighborhood-level and other urban characteristics.
The field of environmental epidemiology has evolved rapidly with the explosion of data, from terabytes characterizing natural, urban, and social environments to nationwide administrative records for outcome assessment and -omics datasets. Alongside these opportunities come important challenges, including the need for methods that can handle high-dimensional, complex data and algorithms that are computationally efficient. Enter the world of buzzwords: data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, which offer powerful tools to meet these needs. AI, in particular, holds promise for harmonizing disparate data sources, including—but not limited to—text and images not traditionally used for exposure assessment and health studies. Yet critical questions remain around the appropriateness, robustness, and generalizability of these methods in our field. This talk will explore both the promise and the pitfalls of these approaches and reflect on what lies beyond the buzzwords.
- Monday, August 18, 2025
- 8:30 – 9:00
Na’Taki Osborne Jelks (Spelman College, USA)
Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, PhD, MPH is an assistant professor of environmental and health sciences at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA and Co-Founder of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, a community-based, environmental justice organization. Jelks investigates urban environmental health disparities; the impact of climate change on marginalized communities; the role that place, race, and social factors play in influencing health; and urban greening and resilience practices and their impact on health. She also develops, implements, and evaluates community-based initiatives that set conditions to enable low-income and communities of color to empower themselves to reduce exposure to environmental health hazards. Jelks’ scholarship centers participatory approaches that engage environmentally overburdened communities in monitoring local environmental conditions, generating actionable data for community change, and developing effective community-based interventions that revitalize toxic, degraded spaces into healthy places. Her research has been supported by public and private entities such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Rockefeller, Robert Wood Johnson, JPB, and National Science Foundations.Â
Darryl Haddock (West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, USA)
Darryl Haddock is the Special Projects Director for the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA). He develops and coordinates special projects related to WAWA’s adult education programs, community outreach and engagement, and participatory science research activities.
In a former role within the organization, Darryl served as the Urban Waters Federal Partnership Ambassador for the Proctor Creek Watershed during which time he was a liaison between Northwest Atlanta community members and nine (9) federal agencies working to improve an imperiled urban waterway, Proctor Creek, and to revitalize the communities through which it flows.Â
Darryl has led WAWA in cultivating critical partnerships with higher education institutions, as Co-PI, of the Greater Atlanta Community Science Collaboratory, an environmentally conscious group Atlanta community-based organizations (CBOs) and Atlanta area higher education institutions (HEIs) who are addressing local-to-global issues through knowledge-sharing, problem identification, scientific collaboration, and public engagement. As Co-PI, he also works on shared interests to develop infrastructure for sustained and cross-institutional collaboration between universities/colleges and community-based organizations to advance community science initiatives.
Darryl is also a Co-PI for the Community Soil Air Water Initiative based at Georgia State University. This learning ecosystem brings together community partners, post-bacculaureate fellows, master’s students, and faculty to assess and address critical needs for and with communities, by using place-based Earth systems science research.
Darryl earned a BA in Geography from Jacksonville University and a MS in Geosciences from Georgia State University.
Using Northwest Atlanta’s Proctor Creek Watershed as a case study, this presentation will describe local community-driven research in which community residents, academics, community-based organizations, and non-governmental organizations leverage local, community knowledge; community science methods; and participatory approaches to identify, document, and analyze the impacts of local environmental hazards and quality of life stressors. This highly collaborative and interdisciplinary work has helped to improve municipal services and community-government collaboration at multiple levels while also demonstrating that the democratization of science can help fill critical data gaps about local conditions, pollution sources, and exposures as well as advance environmental protection, health, and quality of life in underserved and vulnerable communities.
- Monday, August 18, 2025
- 9:00 – 9:30
Kofi A. Amegah (University of Cape Coast, Ghana)
Dr. Amegah has a PhD in Public Health with specialization in Environmental Epidemiology from University of Oulu, Finland. He is an Associate Professor of Environmental and Nutritional Epidemiology at University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and Vice-Dean of the School of Public Health.
His research portfolio is at the interface of nutrition and air pollution health effects with a focus on maternal, perinatal and cardiovascular health outcomes, and understanding the biological mechanisms. He recently established a birth cohort in the Cape Coast Metropolitan Area (CAMAC) to effectively pursue this research inquiry.Â
He leads the Ghana Urban Air Quality Project and Breathe Accra project which has deployed low-cost sensors interspersed with reference grade monitors in Accra and other urban settlements of Ghana to bridge air quality data gaps, undertake risk communication, and conduct epidemiologic research.
He participated in the WHO expert meetings of the Global Platform on Air Quality and Health and is presently a member of the Exposure Working Group of the WHO Global Air Pollution and Health – Technical Advisory Group (GAPH-TAG). He is a steering committee member of the DS-I Africa consortium, an NIH Common Fund Initiative that seeks to transform biomedical and public health research in Africa leveraging data science applications.
He is a Deputy Editor with Journal of Health and Pollution, and Associate Editor with Public Health Nutrition.
The burden of disease (BOD) attributable to ambient air pollution exposure in Africa is growing and yet estimates of its magnitude and impact are possibly underestimated due to lack of air quality monitoring capacity and limited air pollution epidemiological studies. The integrated exposure-response (IER) function used to estimate the BOD attributable to air pollution is derived from long-term (cohort) studies conducted in USA and Europe, locations with low ambient PM2.5 exposures. The IER function thus have limited applicability in Africa, a region where air pollution concentrations are very high (annual PM2.5 average exceeds 100µg/m3) and the relative contribution of specific sources of air pollution differ from those in North America and Europe. There is therefore an urgent need to bridge the huge air quality data gaps in Africa to enable the conduct of robust epidemiologic studies to inform the IER functions for better quantifying the BOD attributable to air pollution exposure on the continent and provide a solid evidence base for investments in air pollution control for public health protection. The proliferation of low-cost air quality sensors in recent times represents an excellent opportunity for bridging these data gaps and is gradually being leveraged in African countries. In this lecture, I will highlight the extent of the air pollution problem in Africa, identify the driving factors and diverse sources, pinpoint the thriving monitoring networks, and showcase the limited exposure health effects studies conducted in the region. I will proceed to outline how the Ghana Urban Air Quality and Breathe Accra Projects which have deployed low-cost sensors interspersed with reference grade monitors in metropolitan areas of Ghana is facilitating a data-driven solutions to the air pollution problem in Ghana as well as helping bridge the epidemiologic evidence gaps in the country.
- Tuesday, August 19, 2025
- 8:30 – 9:00
Andrea Baccarelli (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, USA)
Andrea Baccarelli, MD, PhD, is the Dean of the Faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His work on the health impact of environmental exposures has been used by agencies worldwide to shape pollution control policies. Dr. Baccarelli previously served as chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, director of the NIH/NIEHS P30 Center for Environmental Health and Justice and president of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Baccarelli holds an MD from the University of Perugia in Italy, an MS in Epidemiology from the University of Turin, and a PhD from the University of Milan.
Precision environmental health draws on epidemiological tools to focus on prevention, early risk identification, and interventions to advance public health. My research group developed wet lab and data analysis techniques that examine the biological “fingerprints” left behind by past exposures that serve as biomarkers of disease risk and epidemiological aging. Our novel investigations utilizing extracellular vesicles are enabling us to study target organ health in a non-invasive manner, expanding what we can analyze in a simple blood test. Combining these lab techniques with advances in high-throughput omics and exposome science enables us to take a holistic approach, analyzing multiple exposures and their synergistic effects. By using these tools to examine exposures and factors long before clinical symptoms appear, precision environmental health promises a future where predictive, preventive, and personalized health interventions become possible.
- Tuesday, 19 August, 2025
- 9:00 - 9:30
Brenda Goodman (CNN, USA)
As a health journalist for more than 20 years, Brenda Goodman has developed a passion for environmental health stories, particularly those that explain and educate about the long and short-term effects of chemical exposures.
Some of her extended reporting pursuits as a senior writer at CNN have included the aftereffects of a train derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio; and the ongoing lead poisoning crisis in Milwaukee’s public schools.
Before joining the network, she was a staff writer and investigative reporter for WebMD and Medscape. Her award-winning stories have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Outside Magazine, Scientific American, Health, and Parade. She has a master’s degree from New York University’s Science and Environmental Reporting Program.
Working with media outlets is a mechanism to share scientific findings with the general public. Based on my two decades of reporting on science and health issues, I will share recommendations and tips for communicating with media to ensure that your research is shared with greatest meaning and impact.
- Wednesday, August 20, 2025
- 8:30 – 9:00