ISPH researchers awarded NIH grant to study impacts of climate change on disease transmission

The Intramural Targeted Climate Change & Health (ITCCH) program has awarded a two-year, $185,042 grant to Assistant Professor Nash Rochman, Associate Professor Elizabeth Kelvin and colleagues to support work to improve access to historical and forecasted climate data to better understand the impacts of climate change on infectious disease transmission.

The multidisciplinary team of researchers from the CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health (CUNY ISPH) at CUNY SPH and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will build a website to house historical and forecasted climate data including global temperature measurements, arthropod vector range, and population density to facilitate the incorporation of these global change variables into epidemiological modeling and surveillance.

Incorporating climate and human migration data into models for viral transmission and evolution, the team aims to establish improved estimates for the global population at risk of vector-borne viral infection which may in turn motivate policy.

The ITCCH funding program is a $2.1 million collaboration between the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the NIH Office of Intramural Research.