Drexel received a multi-million dollar grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to establish the Drexel Climate Change and Urban Health Research Center (CCUH). The CCUH will support research to help protect the growing urban populations of the world from the adverse health and equity effects of climate change.
The new Center includes a research project as well as a research capacity building core and a community engagement core. The research project will examine inequities in the effects of extreme heat in cities in the U.S. and Latin America. The heat island effect in cities contributes to high levels of excess deaths, and developing effective climate adaptation strategies will depend on understanding how these outcomes vary within cities and are linked to social inequities. The capacity building core will lead and implement as set of activities to support further development of research capacity in climate change and urban health at Drexel and at our partners institutions. The community engagement core will work with urban policy makers in the U.S. and Latin America to obtain input on key questions for the future and disseminate results in ways that are most useful and impactful.
While the CCUH will be based in at Drexel University in Philadelphia, it will include three additional Research Centers at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil, and the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama in Guatemala, as well as build on an existing network of 13 institutions in the U.S. and Latin America.