Students

Misbath Daouda

PhD Program in Climate and Health
md3851@cumc.columbia.edu

Misbath started her PhD in Fall 2019. Before joining Mailman, she received her MPH in Environmental Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. During her time at Harvard, she worked with UNICEF in Mongolia on a study of the association between air pollution exposure and children respiratory health outcomes in Ulaanbaatar. Prior to that, she assessed the impact of unsustainable tourism activities on the health and well-being of local populations in Tunisia.  She plans to conduct research at the intersection of air pollution-related health outcomes, energy use, and environmental policy in the context of climate change.

Vivian Do

PhD Program in Climate and Health
vd2349@cumc.columbia.edu

Vivian Do began her PhD in the Fall of 2020. She was born and raised in San Francisco, CA but moved to Northfield, MN for her BA in Mathematics/Statistics and American Studies at Carleton College. After working as a healthcare policy analyst, Vivian continued her public health training at Columbia where she received an MPH in epidemiology with a certificate in Climate & Health. Up until this point, she did projects on substance use at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, evaluated mental health programs at the NYC Department of Mental Health & Hygiene, and conducted air pollution research with the University of Hong Kong. As a PhD student at Columbia, Vivian is interested in environmental epidemiology, climate change, and the built environment through a health equity lens. Fun fact: She unironically likes discussing the weather and its underlying science.

Nina Flores

PhD Program in Climate and Health
nf2497@cumc.columbia.edu

Nina Flores began her PhD in the Fall of 2020. She completed her BS in Computational Biology from the University of Texas at Austin in Spring 2020. While at UT, she contributed to projects assessing the factors and impacts of school-based marginalization in grades K-12. At Columbia, she hopes to explore gaps in health outcomes associated with climate change based on racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups.

Emma Gorin

PhD Program in Climate and Health
emg2237@cumc.columbia.edu

Emma Gorin began her PhD in the fall of 2020. She grew up in New York City and received an MSPH in Global Disease Epidemiology and Control from Johns Hopkins University in 2019, where her research included investigating sanitation availability in northern India and mobility among female sex workers in Guinea-Bissau. She also spent a semester in Cameroon working on implementation research and programming for key populations at risk for HIV. Prior to starting her master’s program, she worked in health education, clinical research, and international non-profit settings. Emma is interested in infectious disease dynamics and, while at Columbia, hopes to apply mathematical modelling methods to issues of emerging infectious diseases.

Maggie Li

PhD Program in Climate and Health
ml4424@cumc.columbia.edu

Maggie started her PhD in Fall 2019. Before coming to Columbia, she completed her BA in Geography and BS in Conservation and Resource Studies at UC Berkeley, where she focused on studying geospatial methods of quantifying environmental exposures. She has previously conducted research at Penn State University to spatially visualize particulate matter exposure from seasonal dust loading and respiratory health across Senegal. At Mailman, she hopes to study the differential health impacts of anthropogenic climate change on socially disadvantaged communities, and community-based intervention strategies to bridge these health outcome disparities.

Wil Lieberman-Cribbin

PhD Program in Climate and Health
wfl2112@cumc.columbia.edu

Wil Lieberman-Cribbin started his PhD in Fall 2020. Before joining Mailman, he received his MPH at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a BA in Physics and Geography at Colgate University. Originally from New York, Wil has spent the last five years working as a Clinical Research Coordinator in the Institute for Translational Epidemiology at Mount Sinai. During his time there, he has worked on a variety of research topics including the impact of natural disasters on mental health, racial and health disparities in cancer surgery and outcomes, and the impact of World Trade Center exposure on cancer etiology, biology and outcomes in the WTC Health Program cohort. Most recently he has focused on socioeconomic and racial disparities in COVID-19 testing and outcomes across New York City. He plans to continue incorporating geographic analyses to identify disparities in environmental exposures in the context of climate change at Columbia. 

Brittany Shea

PhD Program in Climate amd Health
bes2161@cumc.columbia.edu

Brittany started her PhD in Fall 2021. Previously, she was the Project Director for the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE), based at the Mailman School. Brittany has worked to advance research on environmental health and climate change in other roles at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies in Santiago, Chile, and Harvard Business School. Brittany has presented internationally on climate-health education and environmental health topics. She received a master’s degree from Harvard University and bachelor’s degree from Boston University. As a PhD student, she is interested in conducting research on the health impacts of climate change, climate-health mitigation and adaptation strategies, and environmental justice.

Raenita Spriggs

PhD Program in Climate and Health
rs4390@cumc.columbia.edu

Rae Spriggs began her PhD in Fall 2022. Rae is originally from San Diego, CA, but has also lived in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. She received her BA from UC Berkeley in 2016 and MPH from UCLA in 2019. Before joining Mailman, she served as the Manager of Climate Action Research at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. There she facilitated the center's climate action and extreme heat research through strategic partnerships and engagement with policymakers, advocates, and impacted communities. As a PhD student, Rae plans to explore the intersection of extreme heat and other climate-related exposures, neighborhood conditions including historical environmental injustice, and mental health outcomes. 

Sabah Usmani

PhD Program in Climate and Health
su2145@cumc.columbia.edu

Sabah Usmani started her PhD in Fall 2021. She is an urban planner and interdisciplinary researcher from India with experience across geographic scales in air pollution and health disparities, energy and water, transportation, informal housing, and climate mitigation and adaptation planning in India, USA, Ecuador, and Malaysia. Her research interests include neighborhood influences on environmental health and wellbeing, spatial/social inequities in access to and quality of basic services and health outcomes, and applied urban analytics and data science for health and climate policy in cities.  Her previous experience includes organizations such as Environmental Defense Fund, New York City Housing Authority, MIT’s Tata Center for Technology & Design, and Mahindra Lifespaces. Sabah has a Master of City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering (minor in Architecture) from Columbia University. She is also an Agents of Change in Environmental Justice Fellow.

Han Yong Wunrow

PhD Program at the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Math 
Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 
nhw2114@columbia.edu

Han Yong began his PhD in the fall of 2021. He received an MS in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington and was a Post-Bachelor Fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, where he worked on the Global Burden of Disease study and the Future Health Scenarios forecasting team. He is interested in the science of transforming raw health data into actionable information through mathematical modeling and computational science. While at Columbia, he hopes to help solve some of the analytical challenges in combining statistical and mechanistic models of infectious disease dynamics.