Patricia Fabian

Dr. Fabian’s work applies a systems thinking lens to research problems of the built environment, indoor air quality, climate, health, and environmental health disparities. She co-directs a study of heat exposure and vulnerability in the cities of Chelsea and East Boston, using mixed methods to understand risk factors and support the design of climate adaptation and mitigation interventions at the individual, household, community, and city levels. She is the site PI for the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast. Her projects are highly interdisciplinary and leverage big data at many scales, including electronic health records, remote sensing data, and geospatial databases of social and environmental determinants of health. Her research group built the first systems science model linking housing, indoor air quality, energy use, and health. This model is being used to evaluate energy-health tradeoffs of interventions to reduce Covid-19 transmission in buildings, quantify the energy-indoor air quality tradeoffs of decarbonization initiatives in current and future climates, and to quantify housing, greenspace, and neighborhood interventions on asthma outcomes.