Congratulations to Prof. Tak Igusa who, along with Prof. Stan Becker of the Bloomberg School and colleagues at MIT, is a part of team that recently received a Bloomberg American Health Initiativeseed grant. The initiative, launched last year with $300 million from Hopkins alumnus and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, focuses on environmental challenges, addiction and overdose, adolescent health risks, violence, and obesity and food systems.
A model for predicting urbanization’s effect on climate change
Grant amount: $15,000
In 1972, an ambitious MIT team built a computer model to track the world’s economy and environment, simulating scenarios for the year 2100 that included total global collapse. Today that Limits to Growth study is both revered for its scope and criticized for its many flaws, according to Gary Lin, a doctoral candidate in the Whiting School of Engineering whose team is using those early systems models as a jumping off point for new climate change predictions.
The project team, which includes professors Stan Becker of the Bloomberg School and Tak Igusa of the Whiting School, will examine the interplay between climate change, urbanization, and population health in regions across the United States. The team is developing data-driven system models that account for complexities like access to food, water, education, and health services, along with economic trends.
The models simulate how all of these factors may affect each other via “feedback loops,” as opposed to many past efforts in this vein that simply offer “one-way projections,” Lin says. Once complete, the findings are intended to inform policy and practice for climate change resiliency.