April 24, 2019

Leah Schinasi, PhD, assistant research professor at the Urban Health Collaborative, was recently awarded the American Heart Association 2019 Career Development Award. This award supports highly promising healthcare and academic professionals to explore innovation questions that will provide preliminary data and training necessary to assure the applicants future success as a research scientist. The American Heart Association 2019 Career Development Award is a $231,000 award with a duration of three years.

Schinasi is an environmental and occupational epidemiologist. Her work focuses on the acute and chronic health effects of exposures encountered in the environment and workplace. Schinasi received her MSPH and PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. After completing her PhD, Dr. Schinasi was a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France. Here, she worked on a study investigating associations between occupational agricultural exposures and lympho-hematopoietic cancer risk.

Currently, her research focuses on the environmental health challenges and opportunities that urbanization processes present. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality in the United States. With a shift of our population headed towards urban areas this presents a challenge and an opportunity. How can an urban area be designed so that it promotes cardiovascular health? Schinasi’s study aims to investigate whether living in greener, more vegetated areas within cities protects against cardiovascular disease mortality.

Schinasi proposes to leverage sixteen years’ worth of large data sources from Philadelphia including geographic, remote sensing, and survey data and combine them with mortality records to estimate the effect of urban greenspace on cardiovascular disease mortality. The project also seeks to understand the optimal types of greenspace for promoting cardiovascular health, and why and how greenspace protects against cardiovascular disease mortality. The empirical data produced from this work can be used to inform targeted urban greening policies and programs designed to promote population level cardiovascular health. 

To read more about the award, click here.