When: Tuesday, August 26, 2025, 5 p.m.
Where: Hawaii Keiki Museum, Waikoloa King's Shops, 69-250 Waikoloa Beach Drive K104 Waikoloa, HI 96738-5720
Presenter: Anna Bershteyn, NYU Grossman School of Medicine
Project HEATWAVE is a collaborative, volunteer-led project to strengthen understanding of extreme heat and its effects on people's health, and to develop tools, policies, and technology to support local analysis and implementation of responses to save lives. More than a billion people will be exposed to life-threatening heat by the end of this century. The project is the first of its kind to combine advanced climate modeling, public health analysis and policy, and medical and technology innovation to mitigate the public health harms of heat waves.
This seminar will share lessons from the project's first year, including building collaborations across several of NYU's global campuses, Georgia Tech, Harvard, BRAC University in Bangladesh, and the global nonprofit SilverLining. The project is expanding across low- and middle-income countries at risk of heat-related humanitarian disasters (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ghana) and high-income countries with extreme heat (USA, UAE) -- particularly coastal areas where the combination of heat and humidity subverts our bodies' ability to cool off.
Anna Bershteyn is an associate professor in the Department of Population health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and director of Project HEATWAVE. Her research focuses on forecasting climate change and pandemics, and comparing policy options using mathematical modeling. Prior to joining NYU, she received a PhD at MIT in HIV vaccine discovery and led the HIV and tuberculosis modeling effort at the Institute for Disease Modeling, now part of the Gates Foundation.
Schedule:
5:00pm doors open
5:30pm start the talk
6:15pm Q&A
6:30pm networking and light pupus
7:00pm pau
About the lecture series
This lecture series is a collaboration of Kona Science Café and the Hawai`i Keiki Museum, with the goal of fostering interests in science and education. There is networking time before and after the presentation to build the science community. It is free and open to the public.