Qinmei Han

Visiting Research Fellow

Biography

Qinmei Han is a geographer who endeavors to evaluate heat-related health impacts in the context of climate change. She uses tools to study how heat waves vary in both frequency and intensity; how populations adapt to heat waves; and how these outcomes affect the health risks of populations from global climate change. Qinmei is now participating in the 973 project “Global Change Risk of Population and Economic Systems (GCR-PES): Mechanisms and Assessments,” a part of the National Key Research & Development Program of China in the field of “global change and mitigation,” funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. As part of sub-project 4 (Globally quantitative assessment GCR-PES), Qinmei has completed a case study about spatio-temporal patterns and contributions of population exposure to storm rainfall in China, and evaluated the future global heat-related mortality risk under different periods and scenarios.

While at the Pardee Center, Qinmei will continue her work on health risks due to extreme heat resulting from climate change. She will work closely with partners to better understand and reliably evaluate population exposure, vulnerability, and health risk variation from heat waves under global climate change scenarios considering both natural and socioeconomic factors. All of her work seeks to improve the understanding of mechanisms linking heat waves and population health risk.

Qinmei received her B.S. in geographic information science at the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan). She is now studying in the five-year PhD program at Beijing Normal University, majoring in natural disasters in the department of Geographical Science.