Our world is changing all the time. Some change is fast, some change is slow, and change looks different to different people. Wielded appropriately, this change can be an awesome tool for learning more about our environment and our health.

I’m most interested in changes in our air quality—air pollution causes millions of deaths each year world-wide. Many countries have implemented regulations to reduce this burden, and we can study these regulations using the Air Pollution Accountability Chain.

This framework describes how regulations impact emissions, air quality, personal dose/exposure, and ultimately public health. Though we can make measurements at each of these links, the relationships that are most informative for policymakers (blue portions of the arrows) are clouded by other factors (red portions).

I’m building a multi-disciplinary team that will advance research across the Air Pollution Accountability Chain. We’ll develop models and devise new techniques to create evidence for continued improvements in environmental policy at scales local to global. If you’re a prospective graduate student with strong analytical skills, please review my ongoing projects and recent papers and reach out.

In the news

• John Kerry cites recent publication in Science in call for no new coal plants
• Lucas Henneman and coauthors quoted on Science publication, including in the The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune
• Munshi Md Rasel wins Air & Waste Management Association scholarship for Environmental Management or Policy Research and Study Related to Air Quality (2023)
• Lucas Henneman quoted in an article titled, When a Coke Plant Closed in Pittsburgh, Cardiovascular ER Visits Plunged (Inside Climate News, Aug. 13, 2023)
• Walter A. Rosenblith New Investigator for 2021 announced (Health Effects Institute, March, 2022)
• Mason Engineer researcher investigates air pollution’s impact on health (VSExpress, Oct. 1, 2020)

Opinion pieces

• Pollution from coal power plants contributes to far more deaths than scientists realized, study shows (The Conversation, 23 November, 2023)
• Proposed power plant in Chesterfield County lands Virginia at a crossroads (Virginia Climate Center Blog, November 2023)
• Protecting ourselves and our families from wildfire pollution (Virginia Climate Center Blog co-authored with Jenna Krall, June 2023)
• INSIGHT: On Air Pollution, Eastern States Are Right to Point Fingers (Bloomberg Environment, Dec. 5, 2019)
• Air quality regulations worked in Atlanta! (and I’m glad we checked) (Medium, Apr. 19, 2018)
• Your climate, your health, and your government (Medium, Nov. 30, 2017)
• Breathing easy: the case for clean air (Medium, Aug. 30, 2017)