Faculty Fanfare: José Cerrato
UNM Engineering Professor José Cerrato will lead a $3.83 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Nursing Research to understand and mitigate the challenges that climate change poses to the health of New Mexicans.
The grant funds the Climate and Health Allied Network for Geospatial and Environmental Science (CHANGES) Exploratory Research Center at UNM.
“I am excited to be the director of an outstanding interdisciplinary team that will establish community partnerships to address complex challenges related to climate change and health in a crucial time,” said Cerrato, a professor and regents’ lecturer in the Gerald May Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering who is the principal investigator on the project.
“I can’t wait to see the exciting work of our center which is driven by the resilient spirit of our communities in New Mexico,” he said.
The center, which opened in September, will be housed at the UNM Accelerating Resilience Innovations in Drylands Institute (ARID), where multidisciplinary researchers are working to improve climate resilience and are studying sustainable water, adaptive infrastructures, healthy ecosystems, and community health and vitality.
“The overall vision of the UNM CHANGES Center is to synergize expertise in geographic information science, health data science, epidemiology, and biomedical research to optimally protect our vulnerable communities in New Mexico from climate change,” Cerrato said.
“Our team includes expertise in culturally-sensitive community engagement, environmental health and toxicology, cancer biology, disaster response and preparedness research, geospatial information systems, biostatistics, and environmental science and engineering,” he said.
At the center, faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers will work together on two projects.
The UNM CHANGES Center will train graduate students and postdoctoral researchers through studies of climate-related disasters and their impacts on health systems, and links between wildfires and cancer.
Components of the grant related to community engagement and data also will allow opportunities for student training, Cerrato said.
Also at the center, researchers will “integrate diverse datasets and leverage cutting-edge tools for geospatial analysis to geographically connect exposure and health outcomes data. This information will allow us to identify – and ultimately predict – gaps in health care, inform policies, and create actionable strategies to protect New Mexican communities,” he said.
Collaborators at the center come from a diverse variety of fields at UNM, including Engineering; Nursing; Geography and Environmental Studies; Earth and Planetary Sciences; Biology; Communication and Journalism; Pharmaceutical Sciences; Internal Medicine; the UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Earth Data Analysis Center.