Leyao Wang Named an NIH Climate and Health Scholar for 2024-25
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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has selected Assistant Professor of Epidemiology Leyao Wang to be part of its third cohort (2024-25) of NIH Climate and Health Scholars.
The NIH Climate and Health Scholars Program was established to help build climate and health research capacity at the NIH. It is a vital component of the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative, an urgent, cross-cutting NIH effort to stimulate research to reduce health threats from climate change across the lifespan and build health resilience in individuals, communities, and nations around the world, especially among those at highest risk.
“This is a great honor and an opportunity for me to work with the National Institutes of Health to advance research and solutions for climate change,” says Wang.
Each Climate and Health (CH) Scholar is hosted by an NIH institute, center, or office (ICO). During this time, the CH Scholars are invited to collaborate with NIH staff on a diverse array of activities to share their scientific knowledge with NIH intramural investigators, program staff, and the broader NIH community.
Wang will be hosted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. There, she will work closely with program directors and other staff to conduct research on climate and lung health and co‐develop a workshop on relevant topics. In addition, Wang will engage in NIH-wide seminars and webinars to deliver her research findings and promote research in the field of climate change and health.
Wang joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in September 2024 from the Washington University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the human microbiome and lung health in the context of climate change. Her research group utilizes epidemiological approaches as well as molecular experiments to understand the assembly of the microbiota in early life and their functional roles in diseases.
In 2018, Wang and her collaborators at San Juan City Hospital in Puerto Rico started conducting a birth cohort study called Hurricane as the Origin of Later Alterations in microbiome (HOLA). HOLA utilized the devastating Hurricane Maria as a natural experiment to characterize how a major disaster may alter the human microbiome in early infancy and lead to increased disease risks later in life. This pioneering work highlighted the profound threat of climate change on human health and the urgent need to understand the science, solutions, and policy implications.
Wang received her PhD in Microbiology from Fudan University and MPH from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. She completed her postdoctoral training at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute and Yale University School of Public Health. She also established an interdisciplinary research program at Washington University School of Medicine, and then, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she holds a joint appointment between the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology and the Institute for Applied Life Sciences.