Climate and health initiative marks inaugural year, charts future agenda

October 16, 2024 – A major initiative aimed at spurring research on climate and health—a joint venture between Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH)—is marking a year’s worth of work and charting a path for the future.

The BUSPH-HSPH CAFÉ Research Coordinating Center (CAFÉ RCC), launched in May 2023 and funded with $6.7 million from the National Institutes of Health, is aimed at expanding and diversifying the field of climate scientists by fostering research collaborations, sharing climate data, holding conferences, and providing training opportunities. The initiative is led by Gregory Wellenius, professor of environmental health at BUSPH, Amruta Nori-Sarma, assistant professor of environmental health at Harvard Chan School, and Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science at Harvard Chan School.

In September, eight NIH program officers met with the CAFÉ team to mark the group’s progress and discuss plans, according to an Oct. 4 BUSPH article. The article outlined CAFÉ’s work over the past year, including organizing a virtual climate and health conference held in February 2024. The conference—an annual event—will return on March 3-6, 2025.

“The CAFÉ virtual conference offers an amazing opportunity for members of our community of practice to connect with the CAFÉ team, the NIH, and each other,” Nori-Sarma said in the article. “We’re so thrilled to repeat the success of our first meeting, where over 900 members of our COP joined us for three days of sessions. We expect the conference in March to take it up a notch.”

CAFÉ also created an open data repository for researchers investigating the health impacts of climate change. Said Dominici—who is also faculty director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative—“Data sharing is essential for scientific progress, transforming individual research into collective breakthroughs.”

Read the BU article: BU-Harvard Center Fosters Climate and Health Data at Crucial Moment

Learn more

BU-Harvard research coordinating center hosts inaugural climate and health conference (republished from BUSPH)

New center aims to spur research on climate change and health (Harvard Chan School news)

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