Upcoming Dates and Topics for Swetland Center Virtual Seminar Series:
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Intersections of Redlining, Urban Heat, and Children’s Health
Date: Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Time: 9:00 - 10:00am (Eastern)
Location: Virtual
Speaker:
- Eun Kyung Lee, PhD, MPH
- Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Environmental Justice
- SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF)
Urban heat islands (UHIs)—areas with elevated temperatures due to dense built environments—intensify during extreme heat events, which are the leading cause of summertime morbidity and mortality. These effects disproportionately impact under-resourced communities in the United States (U.S.). A key contributor to this inequity is redlining, a racially discriminatory federal housing policy from the 1930s-40s that denied home loans in neighborhoods with higher proportions of racial and ethnic minorities. This policy institutionalized disinvestment in “red-lined” areas, shaping contemporary disparities in housing quality, green space access, and environmental exposures, all of which are linked to adverse health outcomes such as asthma and heat-related emergency department (ED) visits. In this talk, preliminary findings will be presented on how racialized housing policies and urban heat intersect to shape pediatric asthma patterns in New York State (NYS), with the goal of informing climate adaptation and equity-focused interventions.
Dr. Lee is a recipient of a pilot project award from the New York University Collaborative Center in Children’s Environmental Health Research and Translation (CEHRT), which supports the work to be presented. She received her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from SUNY, University at Albany and her Master of Public Health from Tufts University School of Medicine.
Learn more about Dr. Lee on her website.