2017 | Environment & Health Outcomes
A synthetic population approach to modeling human health and the environment: A tool for adaptation planning
INVESTIGATORS:
- Dr. Julia Gohlke, Population Health Sciences
- Dr. Todd Schenk, Urban Affairs and Planning
- Eric Smith, Statistics
While the nexus of public health and climate change is critically important, it is not yet well understood. The fundamental questions we aim to address are:
- What are the interacting climate-related factors within the built, social, and natural environments that precipitate adverse health outcomes?
- How can we increase our understanding of these interactions, and devise policy and planning recommendations that respond to them?
Answers to these questions are required to create effective adaptation strategies. We aim to develop a novel analytical method leveraging geocoded birth and death records and spatially-resolved environmental datasets. The proposed method uses simulations from a synthetic population model of movements of individuals through space and time to estimate exposure to built, social, and natural environmental factors. Outputs from the synthetic population are then used within a multi-level statistical model to test hypotheses on the associations between health outcomes and environmental conditions.
Each year, the GCC, with funding from the FLSI and the ISCE at Virginia Tech, accepts proposals from GCC faculty to support interdisciplinary research that will lead to collaborative proposals submitted to extramural funding sources. We are seeking projects that link multiple faculty programs and take advantage of unique combinations of expertise at VT, have societal implications and/or a policy component, deal with emerging global change issues that have regional and global significance, and have high potential to eventually leverage external resources.
