Amir Sapkota

Amir Sapkota is a professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He received a BS in Chemistry and Environmental Sciences from Clark University, Worcester MA, a PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore MD and Post-Doctoral training in Environmental Epidemiology from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon France.

Sapkota's background is in Exposure Assessment and Environmental Epidemiology. Specifically, he focuses on improving our understanding of how climate change impacts human health. Attributes of changing climate are all around us – increases in frequency, duration and intensity of extreme weather events; changes in plant phenology; length of forest fire seasons; changes in duration and timing of monsoon onset and the list continues.

This trend is projected to continue into the foreseeable future, even under the most optimistic scenarios. As such, it poses a very fundamental question – how do we adapt to these new sets of threats as a society?

The bulk of research activities in Sapkota's research group focus on this fundamental question with an overall objective of driving policy discussion to inform effective and meaningful public health adaptation strategies that will minimize climate change driven morbidity and mortality at local, national and global levels.

To that end, his group is interested in unmasking disparities in climate change driven health burdens, understanding compound hazards and developing early warning systems to minimize morbidity and mortality resulting from extreme events with seasonal to sub-seasonal lead time. Within this framework, their work focuses on diarrheal diseases as well as renal and cardiopulmonary health outcomes.

The group strives to inform policy and increase community resilience. In partnership with the Maryland Department of Health, Sapkota's team has been developing public health strategies against climate change threats in Maryland and drafted the first Climate and Health Profile Report for the State that shows how increasing the frequency of extreme weather events is adversely impacting the health of Marylanders. The report further highlights how the burden varies across geographic areas and ethnic subgroups, underscoring the need to incorporate such differential vulnerability in local and regional adaptation strategies to protect public health in changing climate.

More recently, the group formed an international consortium (AWARD-APR) to develop an early warning system for diarrheal diseases in the Asia-Pacific Region to increase community resilience against threats of climate change. Weather-based warnings with 7-10 days lead time do not provide public health professionals enough time to prepare while climate-based warnings with 50-100 years lead time are too distant in the future to drive any meaningful policy discussion at present. Thus, Sapkota's group's focus is to develop location-specific actionable warnings with seasonal to sub-seasonal lead time that are useful to public health agencies.