We’re thrilled to announce the Initiative on Cities 2025 Public Impact Scholars cohort! This year, 21 BU researchers will take part in a multi-day workshop to equip them with skills to translate their research into meaningful policy and societal impact. This group of researchers represents six colleges and 13 departments across the university, sharing a strong commitment to advancing research, policy, and practice aligned with the Initiative’s Urban-H Research Agenda (Housing, Heat, and Health). We look forward to working with the following Public Impact Scholars:
Jacob Brown
Assistant Professor of Political Science, College of Arts & Sciences
Expertise: Where people live, and how where they live influences their politics, including the causes and consequences of political segregation in the United States.
Urban H Interests: Housing, Mental Health
Bahar Erbas
Senior Lecturer of Economics, College of Arts & Sciences
Expertise: Empirical topics related to environmental, resource and energy, and public economics, focusing on environmental regulations and climate change.
Urban H Interests: Heat, Health
Patrick Kinney
Beverly Brown Professor of Urban Health, School of Public Health
Expertise: Issues at the intersection of climate change, health, and policy, including the effects of rising temperatures on mortality in cities, and the impact of climate action plans on health outcomes.
Urban H Interests: Heat, Health
Kipruto Kirwa
Assistant Professor of Environmental Health, School of Public Health
Expertise: How environmental factors affect human health, and how those effects can be mitigated, including the interconnections between indoor and outdoor environmental quality, housing, and health outcomes.
Urban H Interests: Heat, Health, Housing
Kevin Lane
Associate Professor of Environmental Health, School of Public Health
Expertise: Air pollution, built environment, urbanization and the impacts of climate change on health in local, national and international settings with an emphasis on big-data and spatial analyses.
Urban H Interests: Heat, Health, Housing
PhuongThao (PT) Le
Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health
Expertise: Examining mental health and sociocultural issues to inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of health programs and policies among marginalized populations globally.
Urban H Interests: Mental Health, Heat
Jessica Leibler
Associate Professor of Environmental Health, School of Public Health
Expertise: Environmental exposures with two central themes: assessing causes and risk factors for chronic kidney disease of non-traditional origin and environmental transmission of pathogens through food systems.
Urban H Interests: Housing, Health, Heat
Rachel Oblath
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine
Expertise: Provision of psychiatric emergency services to poor and underserved populations, and the relationship between extreme heat and mental health/psychiatric emergency services.
Urban H Interests: Mental Health, Housing
Molly Richard
Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Innovation in Social Science, College of Arts & Sciences
Expertise: Informs strategies to prevent and end homelessness, with a recent focus on how structural inequality contributes to homelessness, and what local and national actors can do in response.
Urban H Interests: Housing, Health
Kaila Rudolph
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine
Expertise: The impacts of social determinants of health, primarily homelessness, on the medical and mental health of older adults.
Urban H Interests: Mental Health, Housing
Emily Ryan
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering
Expertise: Develops computational models of reactive transport, fluid mechanics, heat transfer and electrochemistry to investigate the design and operation of energy-related systems.
Urban H Interests: Heat
Sylvia Shangani
Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health
Expertise: HIV prevention among vulnerable populations in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States, in particular seeking to understand underlying behavioral and social risk factors for health inequities in HIV and mental health outcomes.
Urban H Interests: Health/Mental Health, Housing
Ian Smith
Research Scientist in Earth and Environment, College of Arts & Sciences
Expertise: Anthropogenic influences on the carbon cycle, including landscape fragmentation and urbanization impacts on forest productivity and respiration.
Urban H Interests: Heat, Housing, Health
Keith Spangler
Clinical Assistant Professor of Health Sciences, Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences
Expertise: Health impacts of climate change and other environmental exposures using methods and data sets from both epidemiology and geoscience.
Urban H Interests: Heat, Health
Amanda Tarullo
Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences
Expertise: Effects of early experiences on the neural and behavioral development of infants and young children, with a particular focus on how early life stress shapes the developing brain.
Urban H Interests: Mental Health/Health, Housing
Kathryn Thompson
Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health
Expertise: Leverages economic frameworks to understand how social, demographic, and policy contexts shape health and disparities for women, people of color, and Medicaid populations.
Urban H Interests: Mental Health/Health, Housing
Julia Wagner
Postdoctoral Associate in Earth and Environment, College of Arts & Sciences
Expertise: How cities design and implement regulations and incentives to lower emissions from residential buildings, with a particular focus on making residential decarbonization more accessible to low- and moderate-income households.
Urban H Interests: Heat, Housing, Health
Marcus Walton
Assistant Professor of Political Science, College of Arts & Sciences
Expertise: Democracy and protest in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically looking at how legacies of colonial and post-colonial rule define contentious politics in the 21st century.
Urban H Interests: Housing
Shannon Whittaker
Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Innovation in Social Science, College of Arts & Sciences
Expertise: Intersection of place, race, health and history, examines how social, structural, and political processes such as gentrification impact the health of marginalized communities of color, particularly Black communities.
Urban H Interests: Housing, Health, Heat
Darien Alexander Williams
Assistant Professor of Macro Practice, School of Social Work
Expertise: Environmental & climate justice, broadly engaging Black and Muslim urban planning history, hurricane disaster recovery, climate change, and community organizing.
Urban H Interests: Heat, Housing, Health
Mary D. Willis
Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, School of Public Health
Expertise: Intersection of environmental epidemiology, spatial exposure assessment, and applied data science with a particular interest in how epidemiological studies can be best designed to inform health-protective policy decisions.
Urban H Interests: Health/Mental Health