SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Ana V. Diez Roux MD, PhD, MPH
Ana V. Diez Roux is the Director of the Urban Health Collaborative and Distinguished University Professor of Epidemiology at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health. From 2014 to 2023, she was the Dana and David Dornsife Dean of the Dornsife School of Public Health. Trained as a pediatrician in her native Buenos Aires, she completed public health training at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health. She was Principal Investigator of the Wellcome Trustfunded SALURBAL (Salud Urbana en América Latina/Urban Health in Latin America Study) study and currently co-leads the SALURBAL-Climate Study. Dr. Diez Roux has served on numerous editorial boards, review panels and advisory committees including the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) of the Environmental Protection Agency (as Chair) and CDC’s Community Preventive Services Taskforce. She is currently Co-Chair of the Roundtable on Population Health Improvement of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.
Maryia Bakhtsiyarava PhD
Maryia Bakhtsiyarava is Assistant Research Professor in Drexel’s Urban Health Collaborative and the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health. She is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on understanding the role of climate change on health and health disparities. Dr. Bakhtsiyarava is particularly interested in exposures such as ambient temperature and green space. Her work uses methods from geographic information systems (GIS), spatial data science, epidemiology, and demography. Dr. Bakhtsiyarava received her PhD in Geography at the University of Minnesota, where she was also a trainee in the inaugural cohort of population training program at the Minnesota Population Center. At the Minnesota Population Center she worked on some of the world’s largest and most complex projects that link global population data with environmental and administrative boundary data.
Tarik Benmarhnia PhD
Tarik Benmarhnia is an environmental epidemiologist with a joint appointment at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and School of Medicine. He finished his PhD jointly from the University of Montreal and Paris Sud, and finished two Master’s degrees, one in Environmental Health Sciences Engineering from the French School of Higher Education in Public Health and another in Pharmacy and Ecotoxicology from Montpellier University in France. To further his training, he was an environmental scientist on contaminated soil with the French Railway Company, followed by a Health Scientist position with the French National Institute of Health Education and Prevention, and most recently was a postdoc at McGill University with the Institute for Health and Social Policy.
Joan Casey PhD
Joan A. Casey received her doctoral degree from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Casey uses large secondary spatial data sources to investigate the health impacts of a range of emerging environmental exposures including wildfires, power outages, fossil fuel infrastructure, and the energy transition. She prioritizes the study of joint social and environmental risk factors that help explain persistent health disparities and focuses on policy-relevant climate justice work. Dr. Casey also holds a BS in Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University and an MA in Applied Physiology from Teachers College at Columbia University.
Kai Chen PhD
Kai Chen is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and the Faculty Director of the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health. Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Engineering in 2016 from Nanjing University in China. During 2014-2015, he served as a Visiting Scholar at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Prior to joining the Yale School of Public Health faculty in July 2019, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoc Fellow at Helmholtz Zentrum München-German Center for Environmental Health. Dr. Chen is an environmental epidemiologist who focuses on the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health. His work involves applying multidisciplinary approaches - from climate and air pollution sciences to exposure assessment and environmental epidemiology - to investigate the impacts of climate change on human health. Dr. Chen investigates how ambient temperature and extreme weather events (e.g., drought, floods, wildfires) can affect mortality and morbidity from a comprehensive spectrum of diseases, including myocardial infarction, kidney disease, childhood diarrhea, birth outcomes, unintentional injuries, and mental disorders. He also assesses the adverse health effects of air pollution and their interactions with extreme temperatures from a local to global scale under a changing climate.
Gaige Kerr PhD
Gaige Kerr is an Assistant Research Professor and Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at George Washington University. He researches the drivers and impacts of ambient air pollution with an emphasis on understanding associated disease burdens and disparities. He received his BSc with honors in Atmospheric Science from Cornell University and his MA and PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Johns Hopkins University.
Manuel Franco MD, PhD
Manuel Franco is a Social and Urban Epidemiologist and an Ikerbasque Research Professor at the Basque Climate change Research Centre. He also holds adjunct faculty positions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health in the USA. Dr. Franco earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins as a Fulbright Scholar. His research focuses on the social epidemiology and prevention of chronic diseases and their major risk factors. He was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant “Heart Healthy Hoods,” studying how urban characteristics relate to lifestyle and health. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles and has raised over €3.2 million for his research.
Katie Anderson MPH
Katie Anderson is an Epidemiologist at the Division of Disease Control for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. She holds a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from Drexel University and a Bachelor of Science in Health Science from Virginia Commonwealth University. Katie manages and analyzes locallevel data to support public health initiatives. In her role, Katie contributed to the evaluation and enhancement of the City’s early warning system for extreme heat events by applying data-driven insights to improve response strategies. Katie’s work supports the identification of adaptive measures, ensuring that response thresholds are responsive to climate change. Her efforts help optimize resource allocation and strengthen community protection during prolonged or severe heat waves. In addition to her work on extreme heat events, she has engaged in identifying risks, data gaps, and opportunities for evidence generation in public health preparedness, including health equity considerations. She currently supports the Immunizations Program by overseeing surveillance activities, data analysis, and quality assurance efforts to track vaccine-preventable diseases and monitor immunization coverage levels.
Rodrigo Perpétuo PhD
Rodrigo Perpétuo is the Regional Director of ICLEI South America and a PhD student in Environmental Sciences. He holds a PhD degree in Environmental Science, a degree in Economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), and a Master’s in International Relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUC-MG). Rodrigo has held prominent public sector roles, including Head of the International Relations Office for the State Government of Minas Gerais and Municipal Secretary of International Relations for Belo Horizonte.
Abby Sullivan MRM, CFM
Abby Sullivan is the Chief Resilience Officer in the Philadelphia Office of Sustainability. In this role she leads Philadelphia’s citywide resilience planning. Previously, she served as an Environmental Scientist at the Philadelphia Water Department where she worked on their green stormwater infrastructure program and led the Department’s coastal flood resilience efforts on the Climate Change Adaptation Program. Abby is a Certified Floodplain Manager and serves on NASA’s Sea Level Change Practitioner Consultation Board. She has a Master of Resource Management degree from the University of Akureyri in Iceland.
Raynard Washington PhD, MPH
Raynard Washington is the director of the Public Health Department, one of four departments that make up the Mecklenburg County Health and Human Services Agency. He is responsible for managing all public health and environmental health activities in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Prior to joining the County, he served as Chief Epidemiologist and Deputy Health Commissioner for the City of Philadelphia and as a health research scientist for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Healthcare, Research, and Quality.
Usama Bilal MD, PhD, MPH
Usama Bilal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics and Co-Director of the Urban Health Collaborative at the Drexel Dornsife School of Public Health. His primary research interest is the macrosocial determinants of health, with an interest in describing health inequities in urban environments, specifically urban health in Latin American cities (the Urban Health Collaborative’s SALURBAL project); the unequal effects of climate change on urban health; and policy modifiers that mitigate/exacerbate these effects. Bilal received the prestigious NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (DP5) in 2018 for his “The Health Consequences of Urban Scaling” project, and the 2024 Drexel Provost Early Career Outstanding Productivity Award. He earned a PhD in Cardiovascular Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from the Universidad de Alcala in Spain, and MD from the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain.
