Rachel Connolly is project director for air quality and environmental equity research with the Luskin Center for Innovation at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a staff researcher in the Environmental Health Sciences department within the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. At the Luskin Center, her research has largely focused on transportation equity, with many projects involving the evaluation of environmental incentive programs with regard to increasing access to environmental amenities for underserved populations. In collaboration with the Fielding School, she works on projects focused on quantifying the health impacts associated with urban green space access and exposure to climate hazards, such as wildfires and extreme heat.
Rachel received her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from UCLA in 2023. She also has an MS in Environmental Health Sciences from UCLA and a BS in Environmental Science from UC Berkeley.
Michael Jerrett, PhD is an internationally recognized expert in Geographic Information Science for Exposure Assessment and Spatial Epidemiology. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Toronto (Canada). For the past 22 years, he has researched how to characterize population exposures to air pollution and built environmental variables, how to understand the social distribution of these exposures among different groups (e.g., poor vs. wealthy), and how to assess the health effects from environmental exposures. Over the last decade, he has also studied the contribution of the built and natural environment to physical activity, obesity, and several health outcomes. In 2009, the United States National Academy of Science appointed him to the Committee on “Future of Human and Environmental Exposure Science in the 21st Century.” The committee recently concluded its task with the publication of a report entitled "Exposure Science in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy." In 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency appointed him to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Sub-Committee for Nitrogen Oxides. From 2014 to the present, he has been named to the Thomson Reuters List of Highly Cited Researchers, indicating he is in the top 1% of all authors in the fields of Environment/Ecology in terms of citation by other researchers.
