ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SCIENCES RESEARCH CENTER
A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center of Excellence

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EHSRC Investigator Detail

Dr. Naresh Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Associate Director of the Institute for Inequality Studies, and faculty affiliate at Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research and Environmental Health Sciences Research Center, the University of Iowa. He also serves as an Adjunct Faculty in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University.

His research interests include respiratory health effects of short- and long-term personal exposure to air pollutants, time-space dynamics of air pollution using satellite remote sensing, indirect methods of computing exposure in micro-environment and optimal sampling design for air pollution monitoring and health surveys. He serves as a PI and Co-PI on several NIH and EPA funded projects.

His current NIH projects focus on health effects of air quality regulations in Delhi, India. Dr. Kumar employs state of the art techniques in atmospheric remote sensing and spatial-temporal dynamic models to compute time-space resolved estimates of exposure. These estimates are then linked with the time-activity diaries and residential history of ~4000 individuals to compute their long-term exposure. The other part of these projects focuses on modeling the burden of mortality alleviated in response to air quality regulations in Delhi.

Dr. Kumar’s spatial sampling work has begun to revolutionize air pollution sampling and health survey designs. His sampling strategy optimizes sampling sites in order to capture maximum variance with the minimal sample size controlling for redundancy (by minimizing spatial autocorrelation). This sampling design has been adopted by EPA for deploying passive samplers to monitor coarse particulates. A variant version of his indoor and outdoor air pollution monitoring design in the Iowa City area is likely to be adopted by the General Social Science survey at the national scale.

Selected Publications

1. Kumar, N., Spatial Sampling for Intra-Urban Population Exposure Assessment. Atmospheric Environment 2008. (forthcoming)

2. Kumar, N., A. Chu and A. D. Foster. Remote Sensing of Ambient Particles in Delhi and its Environs: Estimation and Validation. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 29(12), 2008: 3383-3405. ISI:000255999500002

3. Ott, D., N. Kumar and T. Peters, Passive sampling to capture spatial variability in PM10–2.5. Atmospheric Environment, 42: 746-56, 2008. DOI:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2007.09.058

4. Kumar, N., A. Chu and A. D. Foster. An empirical relationship between PM2.5 and aerosol optical depth in Delhi Metropolitan. Atmospheric Environment, 41(21): 4492–4503, 2007. doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2007.01.046

5. Kumar, N. Spatial Sampling for a Demographic and Health Survey. Population Research and Policy Review, 26(5-6): 581-99, 2007. DOI: DOI 10.1007/s11113-007-9044-7, 2007.

6. Kumar, N. and A. Foster. Have CNG regulations in Delhi done their job?  Economic and Political Weekly, 42(51): 48-58, 2007.

7. Kumar, N. and Adina. K. Batnitzky. Is India Heading for Obesity Epidemic? Asian Profile, 34(5): 477-92, 2006.

8. Kumar, N., Changing Geographic Access to and Locational Efficiency of Health Services in Two Indian Districts between 1981 and 1996. Social Science and Medicine, 58(10): 2045-2067, 2004.

  Environmental Health Sciences Research Center, The University of Iowa, 100 Oakdale Campus, #178 IREH, Iowa City, IA 52242

Tel: (319) 335-4756 / Fax: (319) 335-4225 / E-mail: nancy-newkirk@uiowa.edu