Dr. Patricia Fabian
Fireside #1 Speaker
Patricia Fabian is an Associate Professor of the Department of Environmental Health, Associate Director with the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability and affiliated with the Hariri Institute for Computing and the Graduate Program in Urban Biogeoscience and Environmental Health. She conducts research and teaching focused on health and environmental health disparities in the built environment, and built the first systems science model linking housing, indoor air quality, energy use, and health. She is the BU site PI for the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast and co-directs a study of heat exposure and vulnerability in the cities of Chelsea and East Boston. Her research teams are highly interdisciplinary and projects leverage big data at many scales, including electronic health records, remote sensing, and geospatial databases of social and environmental determinants of health (SDOH). Her research group has published over 100 articles in the peer-reviewed literature. Dr. Fabian was a Steering Committee member for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs on the 80×50 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Study.
Current research interests: quantifying the energy-indoor air quality-health tradeoffs of decarbonization initiatives in current and future climate through systems science modeling, evaluating energy-health tradeoffs of interventions to reduce Covid-19 transmission in buildings, and supporting the design of heat adaptation and mitigation interventions at the individual, household, community, and city levels through community engaged research.