Fall Research Expo 2021

Effects of Air Pollution Variables on Health Disparities in the Philadelphia Region

Over the summer, as a part of the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentorship program (PURM),  I worked with Professor Blanca Himes to understand whether Air Pollution disproportionately affects certain demographics in the Philadelphia region. Over my time as a part of Himes Lab, I had the opportunity to explore new methods of data collection and modeling and gained new skills to help my research in the future.

I began by conducting exploratory research and analysis on my data, plotting out various graphs and maps of my data. I used American Community Survey (ACS) data from the Census Bureau and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data on daily criteria air pollutant readings for 2020. After cleaning the data, I proceeded to plot heatmaps of pollutant prevalence in the Philadelphia region. This helped me understand the exact number of recording stations in the region and helped me discard PM 10 readings, which only had one recording station in the region.

Following this, I proceeded to conduct a correlation analysis of all remaining pollutants with various demographic percentages in the Philadelphia region. I used data from the Census Bureau to ensure demographic data was as comprehensive and accurate as possible. The analysis showed that there was a strong positive correlation between demographics and several pollutants for White Americans in the Philadelphia region, a mixed combination of correlations for Black Americans, and a negative correlation for Hispanic Americans. This was counterintuitive to previous literature on this subject, and I believe would be an interesting subject for further study. 

PRESENTED BY
PURM - Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program
Engineering & Applied Sciences 2024
Advised By
Blanca E. Himes
Associate Professor of Informatics in Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Join Karan for a virtual discussion
PRESENTED BY
PURM - Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program
Engineering & Applied Sciences 2024
Advised By
Blanca E. Himes
Associate Professor of Informatics in Biostatistics and Epidemiology

Comments

Very interesting project! What indicators did you use to gauge negative health effects on these populations? Is it possible that they could go undiagnosed in certain communities? Perhaps this is what you mean by differing income levels?

Karan, I really enjoyed reading this and found it especially interesting as a native Philadelphia resident. I agree that future considerations for this research should look into any correlations with income. I would also be interested in seeing how this data compares to other cities, in particular ones that are more similar to the Philadelphia region.