EPIcenter Showcases Energy and Public Health Seed Grant Research in a Mini Symposium

On Friday, May 10th, four Georgia Tech researchers, supported through the Energy, Policy, and Innovation Center’s (EPIcenter) seed grant program presented their research findings to an engaged audience of fellow researchers and students. 

The research team consisted of Georgia Tech faculty from across three colleges who presented their interdisciplinary research findings at the intersection of human health and energy systems. 

The event began with a welcome address by Laura Taylor, the interim director of EPIcenter followed by EPIcenter’s director of Research Studies, Rich Simmons, who provided an overview of the vision behind the seed grant program. The seed grants were a culmination of a June 2020 workshop that invited researchers to proactively identify and mitigate new energy-health intersections and challenges by developing the knowledge to respond effectively to the interrelated challenges of public health and our current, and future energy infrastructure. The symposium included presentations from:

• Pengfei Liu, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, on climate-induced air quality deterioration and its health risks in the Southeastern United States.
• Dan Molzahn, assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Xin Xie, professor in Civil Engineering on assessing the impacts of electric vehicle adoption and charging on air pollution and health
• Shuichi Takayama, professor in Biomedical Engineering  on improving toxicology models that measure the impact of particulate matter on lung functioning to enhance energy and environmental policy-making
• Laura Taylor, on linking transit-related air pollution to health outcomes using the causal inference framework.