Lehman Student Receives Award for Research on Asthma in the Bronx

Andrew Maroko, a doctoral student in the Earth and Environmental Science program at the CUNY Graduate Center and Lehman College, received a cash award and a certificate last month for his work on the relationship between pollution and disease in the Bronx. His study shows that more people in the Bronx were exposed to air pollution from major stationary point sources than was previously known.

The award was given at the NOAA-CREST Symposium, held February 20-22 at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez. At the symposium, Maroko presented the paper “Loose-coupling an air dispersion model and a geographic information system (GIS): Asthma and air pollution in the Bronx, New York City.” He coauthored the paper with Prof. Juliana Maantay of Lehman’s Environmental, Geographic and Geological Sciences Department and Jun Tu, also a doctoral candidate in the Earth and Environmental Science program.

The paper describes a set of novel procedures for linking a mathematical pollutant dispersion model and a geographical information system, using asthma and air pollution as a case study to illustrate the new method. The findings will enable health researchers, epidemiologists and others to look more realistically at the relationship between pollution and disease.

“I suppose the simplest thing to say is that there is a statistically significant association between estimated exposure to certain locally emitted airborne pollutants and an increased risk of being hospitalized for asthma,” said Maroko.

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