Health, Environment, & Policy Program

In 2025, the Health, Environment and Policy program advanced major initiatives in health research, air quality forecasting, environmental economics, and regulatory policy, while expanding international partnerships and securing new research funding. Key accomplishments include: launching a multi-center asthma intervention with the Children’s Environmental Health Research and Translation Center (CEHRT) network and Kaiser Permanente; improving wildfire and global air quality forecasting through NASA-supported model development; contributing economic assessments to inform the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases; supporting federal rulemaking and litigation via scientific and legal analysis; and strengthening capacity-building efforts in Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The program also received new funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), NASA’s Satellite Needs Working Group (NASA SWNG), and the NYU CEHRT Center and maintained a strong publication record.

Health Research: Cromar established and serves as the overall project PI for a multi-center collaboration between the NIEHS Collaborative Centers in Children’s Environmental Health Research and Translation (CEHRT) and the Kaiser Permanente (KP) medical network to implement health-focused interventions for families with children with asthma. The project includes a home-based intervention model and an integrated risk communication system that alerts households to heat waves, outdoor air pollution, and exceptional pollution events. The initial intervention was launched in northern California in 2025, with a nationwide scale-up across the KP network and geographically matched CEHRT institutions planned for 2026.

Geoscience Research and Translation: The program continued work on improving forecasts of air pollution from wildland fires through a NASA-funded effort to develop and disseminate the Hazardous Air Quality Ensemble System (HAQES). Cromar and his team advanced the ensemble model to reduce false positives and strengthen probabilistic predictions of smoke exposure for use by air quality agencies and health networks. This work was featured at a special wildland fire symposium at the annual International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) and International Society of Exposure Science (ISES) conference. The team also collaborated with NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office to provide bias-corrected air quality forecasts for US Department of State locations and other partners worldwide using the GEOS-CF model and Pandora network.

Environmental Economics: The program remained deeply engaged in the economic assessment of environmental risks to inform policy analysis. Cromar collaborated with members of the economics chapter of the discontinued sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA6) to synthesize current evidence on the economic impacts of climate change in the United States. He also continued his role as PI for a multi-institutional project funded by the Wellcome Trust to integrate the health impacts of outdoor air pollution, including climate-driven increases in wildland fire risk, into economic models used to estimate the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (SC-GHG). Cromar hosted the annual Wellcome Climate and Health conference at NYU and participated in a Resources for the Future workshop focused on strengthening SC-GHG estimates.

Policy and Law: Cromar and his team provided extensive support for policy and legal actions involving environmental regulations. The program contributed written and oral comments on numerous federal rulemakings and supported the preparation of amicus briefs for major litigation. Topics included delays and the proposed repeal of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for power plants, reconsideration of the endangerment finding and greenhouse gas vehicle standards, revisions to methane standards for oil and gas sources, and state efforts to restrict public access to environmental information.

International Capacity Building: The program expanded its global partnerships in 2025. Cromar and his team continued to advise government leaders in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; strengthened collaboration with UNICEF to reduce air pollution health risks in Quito, Ecuador; and provided training and technical guidance to government officials in Mexico, including serving as a keynote speaker at an air quality conference convened by the Inter-American Development Bank. Additional work supported ongoing environmental health research in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

New Research Funding and Publications: Pilot awards from the NYU School of Medicine CEHRT Center were received by Gina Gonzales, Noussair Lazrak, and Kevin Park. New NASA Satellite Needs Working Group (SNWG) funding was awarded to further the development of GEOS-CF bias-correction tools, and NIEHS funding was secured to expand health interventions within the KP network. While translational impact remains the keystone of the program, the team also remained active in peer-reviewed scientific publishing, contributing five new articles in 2025.