With Manish Desai, Krishnendu Mukhopadhyay, Naveen Puttaswamy, Sankar Sambandam, Gurusamy Thangavel, and Kalpana Balakrishnan. The world’s most ambitious scale up of clean fuels has taken place across India in the past five years. The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) program, building upon previous efforts, provided access to LPG for an additional 80 million homes. However, […]

The proposed study will evaluate the effectiveness of a health-focused community program transitioning low-income and health-vulnerable populations from gas to induction cooking, aiming to reduce exposure to household air pollution. The study will conduct exposure assessments, build a comprehensive database of personal and kitchen air pollutant concentrations, and apply a rigorous stepped-wedge design across 300 […]

Cooking using biomass is ubiquitous; the burdens of fuel collection and household air pollution exposure impose physical, social, economic, and environmental costs on women and children. We will design, refine, and test implementation strategies to promote purchase and use of electric induction stoves – arguably the cleanest household cooking solution – among low-income households in […]

The Household Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) Trial is an international multi-center study aimed at assessing the impact of a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cooking stove and fuel intervention on health. HAPIN Trial centers are located in four countries: Guatemala, India, Peru and Rwanda. The HAPIN Trial was launched in 2017 with formative research. Main […]

Extreme heat poses acute and chronic risks to workers across South Asia, yet personal exposure data from occupational settings remain scarce. Informal workers, who dominate textile and sanitation sectors, are disproportionately vulnerable: despite labor protections, they operate outside labor laws, lacking written contracts, social security, and healthcare benefits, while facing severe occupational, social, and economic […]

With Pengbo Liu, PhD, MPH (Co-PI), Christine Moe, Danny Wilson, Ashley Styczynski, Nichole Starr, and N95Decon. The global supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) – including surgical masks, N95 filtering facepiece respirators, gloves, and gowns – has been limited during the current pandemic. PPE serves as a first line of defense for healthcare workers and […]

With Lisa Thompson (Emory), Johannes Urpelainen (Johns Hopkins), Carlos Gould (Columbia), and Morsel Research and Development (Uttar Pradesh, India) India has undergone a dramatic household energy transformation in recent years, driven by government initiatives to increase clean fuel access. These improvements have not led to complete transitions to clean cooking, with most households continuing regular […]

With colleagues at Berkeley Air Monitoring Group, the World Bank, and LIRE (Vientiane), we are developing standard methods for estimating the health benefits (in the form of ADALYs – avoided disability-adjusted life years) that can be attributed to a stove project to introduce advanced combustion stoves in villages within the Savannakhet region of Laos. This […]

In Maharashtra, India, we collaborated with Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research (SRIHER) and KEM Hospital Research Centre to provide clean fuels to pregnant women, recruited in the late first or early second trimester, in Pune district, Maharashtra, India. Our study sought to evaluate whether fuel use could be incentivized using a conditional […]

This research quantifies the contribution of households to ambient air pollution in North India by (1) updating and improving existing emissions inventories through activity-based modeling at high temporal and spatial resolution, (2) providing field-based emissions of SVOCs and other ozone precursors to, for the first time, model the contribution of household air pollution to regional […]

NBSP – a partnership between the International Clinical Epidemiology Network (INCLEN), Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and Sri Ramachandra Institute for Higher Education and Research (SRIHER) – evaluated the feasibility of distributing clean cookstoves through the rural antenatal care system, which targets arguably the most vulnerable population — poor, pregnant, rural women. The study distributed 200 […]