About the Speaker:

Joel Schwartz is a Professor in the departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, on the steering committee of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and Director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. His major research interests include health effects of air pollution, of heavy metals, climate change, and drinking water, epidemiological methods, risk assessment and cost benefit analyses. He has examined these questions using a variety of methods including time series, case-crossover, and case-only analyses of administrative data, survival and repeated measures analyses of cohorts, repeated measures analyses of panel studies, etc. He is particularly interested in quasi-experimental designs and other causal models. These have included a range of outcomes including cognitive function, lung function, asthma, heart attacks, strokes, deaths, blood pressure, lipid levels, biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative stress, markers of biological aging, and epigenetic changes. He is particularly interested in social and other factors conveying increased susceptibility. In addition, he has been involved in exposure modeling, using machine learning to combine land use data, remote sensing data and chemical transport models. He is also interested in methodological issues, including dose-response modeling, causal modeling, and data fusion. Dr. Schwartz' benefit-cost analysis on lead in gasoline was responsible for its elimination in the United States, and his methodology for valuing the benefits of reducing toxins that have cognitive effects is widely used. He is the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, and the John Goldsmith Award from the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology.