Michelle L. Bell
Assistant Professor of Environmental Health
Research Statement
Dr. Bell’s research addresses air pollution and human health by integrating several disciplines, such as environmental engineering and epidemiology. She aims to combine her engineering and public health backgrounds to examine the air pollution system from emissions to ambient concentrations to the impact on human health. The overall aim of her work is to answer scientific questions regarding how air pollution affects health and to perform policy-relevant research that contributes to well-informed decision-making and to greater public understanding of environmental health hazards.Much of Dr. Bell’s work uses mathematical modeling to examine the relationship between air pollution, weather, and human health endpoints such as mortality and hospital admissions. Some of this research examines high air pollution episodes. For instance, one project researched the health impacts of the London Fog of 1952, a historically important air pollution episode that catalyzed modern-day scientific study and policy for air pollution. The results indicated that 10,000 to 12,000 persons died from the episode, rather than the 3,000 to 5,000 typically reported. Other research examines the association between health and air pollution at typical concentrations over longer time periods. As an example, a recent study identified a link between ozone levels and increased risk of mortality for 95 U.S. urban communities for 14 years of data, covering over 40% of the U.S. population. Other work on ozone and mortality includes estimating the exposure-response curve and exploring whether heterogeneity in ozone-mortality estimates can be explained by community differences in socio-economic characteristics.
Additional recent and ongoing projects include a study of heat-related mortality in Latin American cities, the impacts of air pollution on low birth weight in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and the relationships between the chemical composition of particulate matter and health. Dr. Bell is also interested in the health impacts of climate change; in particular the potential changes in air pollution due to climatic change and the subsequent health impacts. Currently, Dr. Bell has research projects based in the United States, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Taiwan.
