Publications

We found the 2019 American Academy of Ophthalmology Annual Meeting was estimated to emit more carbon than what is used to power over 5000 homes in a year. Our research looks at various strategies and finds simply holding the meeting in a different location could reduce it by as much as 19%, other formats may cut it by 38%.

Global warming is a public health emergency that poses significant threats to mental health. The need for graduate medical education about the effects of climate change on health has increasing support from organizations like the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but it is unclear what is currently taught in psychiatry residencies training about the mental health impacts of global warming. We therefore designed an online module to assess what U.S. psychiatry trainees currently learn about the impacts of climate change on mental health to determine the perceived importance of learning about this topic.

In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic the APA canceled their 2020 Annual Meeting. We sought to estimate the avoided carbon emissions from holding the conference virtually and explore the impact of strategic planning for future meetings.

This work examines the flows of rural-to-urban migration in China with a focus on the trail of remitted cash and its role in rural village income inequality. It is the first to decompose rural household income inequality by income factor component using all 5 waves of rural household data available from CHIP (and RUMiC) surveys. Repeated cross section data is used to examine trends of the rural income profile and income inequality. Rural household income inequality is decomposed by factor component through the Gini index, the constant of variation, and the half-squared coefficient of variation. This thesis focuses the lowest and most vulnerable strata of the rural household income distribution with attention to different income sources’ capacity to alleviate poverty, situated within the broader context of Chinese liberalization. Migrant worker remittance flows are framed as spatial links whose proliferation is a co-production of an increasingly liberalized and competitive setting both in rural villages and urban centers of China. Remittance share regressions, analogous to Engel Curve regressions, are run to examine the differential impact of remittances across the rural income gradient. The statistical dispersion of remitted income is used as a proxy to illuminate the links between migration and a shifting gradient of rural mobility. Remittance income is found to have significant mitigatory effects on rural income inequality. Households in the 10th-50th percentile of the income distribution are found to have a significant dependence on remittances.