The Population Research Institute

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Abstract The impacts of climate change on human health are likely to be significant, overwhelmingly negative, and unequally distributed. Documenting and mitigating climate impacts on health requires significant investments in infrastructure and capacity building, as recognized by recent National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiatives. Additionally, population health scientists must expand their methodological toolkits and form new collaborations both within the field and with experts in climate sciences. To address these gaps, the Population Research Institute (PRI) at Penn State requests supplemental funding to support a new primary research area (PRA) in climate change and health (CCH) under its Population Dynamics Centers Research Infrastructure Program grant (2P2CHD041025-21) in response to the Notice of Special Interest (23-06): Climate Change and Health Administrative Supplements. Proposed activities address three core pillars of the NIH CCH initiative: Health Effects Research, Health Equity, and Training and Capacity Building. Penn State has unique strengths in both population health and climate science, yet their intersection—CCH—is a newly emerging research area, and many PRI researchers in this space are early-stage investigators. Our overarching goals are to increase PRI’s capacity to bring population health and climate scientists together to form interdisciplinary, multi-expertise teams; help faculty who study CCH to become NIH grant-active population scientists; increase expertise among other faculty who want to move into CCH research; and expand our portfolio of NICHD-funded CCH projects. To reach these goals, we will expand the initial aims of the center grant in the following ways. Extending Parent Aim 1, we will add a new PRA in CCH, supported by resources and activities described in Aims 2-4 of this application. Extending Parent Aim 2, we will: a) engage faculty working in CCH to lead a new working group that fosters research collaborations and NICHD-funded research in CCH; b) supplement the PRI brown bag series with four external CCH speakers; c) host a “CCH 101” workshop to provide instruction in measures, methods, and frameworks for studying CCH, and promote the development of new research teams and projects; and d) fund four targeted seed grants to incentivize the formation of interdisciplinary teams and support the development of new NICHD applications in CCH. Seed grant recipients will also receive feedback on their applications through required participation in PRI’s grant writing working group. Extending Parent Aim 3, we will e) provide data acquisition and programming support, via PRI’s Computational and Spatial Analysis Core, to help research teams use climate and health data to conduct preliminary research for their CCH grant applications. Extending Parent Aim 4, we will f) invest additional resources to enable PRI’s Administrative Core to support the proposed CCH activities. The requested supplemental funds will facilitate the development of new individual grants in this research area and position PRI to include CCH in the renewal of its NICHD-supported P2C infrastructure grant.