Recap: Hurricanes and Health: Understanding Risks and Fostering Resilience
Thank you to all who joined us for the Hurricanes and Health: Understanding Risks and Fostering Resilienceonline conference on August 4, 2025! If you missed it, or want to revist key moments, here’s a recap:
Hurricanes & Health Expert Panel
- Research update: Arbor Quist from Ohio State University opened with an overview of hurricanes and health research, and discussed key challenges and research gaps.
- Landfall frequency: Shaui Wang from the University of Delaware described the increasing frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the Atlantic basin due to shifting climate patterns.
- Emergency preparedness: Edwin Sumargo from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs and Mike Souza from Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency shared how state level emergency management teams prepare and coordinate for hurricanes across sectors.
- Hurricane Forecasting: John Morales from NBC-6, South Florida spoke about evolving challenges in hurricane forecasting and the potential health implications for communities.
Hurricanes & Health Lighting Talks
Quick as a flash! 7-minute presentations to spark new ideas
Our seven lighting talk speakers delivered fast-paced, impactful talks covering hurricane effects on mortality, chronic conditions, birth outcomes, diarrheal diseases and older populations, as well as the implementation of resilient health care systems and spatiotemporal modeling to potentially decrease health impacts.
Speakers included:
- Arnab Gosh, Cornell University
- Jiahang He, Boston University
- Xuejuan Ning, Yale School of Public Health
- Szu Yu Lin, The University of Tokyo
- Michelle Evans, Pivot
- Elena Naumova, Tufts University
- Ryan Zomorrodi, University of Illinois Chicago
- Elizabeth Fussel, Brown University*
* We regret that we experienced technical difficulties and could not record Elizabeth Fussel’s presentation.
Workshop: Assessing hurricane exposure for epidemiological research
This workshop, led by Brooke Anderson from Colorado State University, covered how to assess hurricane wind exposure for epidemiological studies using storm tack data and wind field models. She introduced R packages “hurricaneexposure” and “hurricaneexposuredata”, which allow researchers to estimate local-level exposure to hurricanes. She took a deep dive into analytical methods for assessing hurricane exposure, using wind exposure over time in this example case with the R “hurricaneexposure” package.
Watch the workshop | Access the R Package
Stay tuned for future events like this!
