UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Christa Brelsford, research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, will give the talk, “Cities, climate change and disease: How can science help humanity solve big problems?” at 4 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 26, via Zoom. Brelsford’s talk is part of the spring 2024 EESI EarthTalks series, “Urban Systems Science.”
“Quantifying interactions between social systems and the physical environment we live within has long been a major scientific challenge,” Brelsford said. “A better empirical understanding of dynamic interactions between the physical or natural context and urban social structure is necessary to support predictions of how people and cities might respond to climate change, disease and other emergent threats, ensure energy and water security for their residents, and to facilitate urban sustainability and resilience.”
In her talk, Brelsford will describe research focusing on predictions of the urban built environment, Diphtheria cases in the early 1900s, and causal inference in human-natural systems. These projects use different datasets, methods and theoretical backgrounds, but are all aimed at developing empirical strategies to increase our understanding of how social and physical systems are coupled.
Brelsford’s research uses data science tools from economics, geography, network science and spatial statistics to describe the co-evolutionary processes between human systems and the built and natural environment. Brelsford was previously the Liane Russell Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. She obtained her doctoral degree from the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University in 2014.
The talk is part of the EarthTalks spring 2024 series, “Urban Systems Science,” which is exploring complex urban systems including interactions between tightly connected human and natural systems both within city boundaries and between cities and the surrounding rural environment. For more information about the spring 2024 series, visit the EarthTalks website.