Cities, Climate Change, and Disease: How Science Can Help Humanity Solve Big Problems.

Presenter: Christa Breslford, PhD

Quantifying interactions between social systems and the physical environment we live within has long been a major scientific challenge. 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 lecture, Dr. Brelsford will describe research focusing on Diphtheria cases in the early 1900s, recent COVID-19 cases, and predictions of the urban built environment. 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. 

Bio: Christa Brelsford is a Research Scientist in the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Her 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.   These analyses have been particularly focused on urban contexts; exploring themes of urban water management, infrastructure provisioning and resilience, and human behavioral responses to surprising events.  Dr. Brelsford was previously the Liane Russell Fellow at ORNL, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. She obtained her Ph.D. from the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University in 2014 for research on the determinants of residential water demand. Dr. Brelsford is currently leading efforts to use novel data sources such as digital trace data to generate real-time measures of community structure and behavior change and to describe the drivers and consequences of those outcomes from a national security perspective.