Climate and Health Research Initiative receives $4.5 million Duke Endowment award
The Duke Endowment recently awarded Duke’s interdisciplinary Climate and Health Research Initiative (CHeRI) $4.5 million to fund research at the intersection of climate change and health.
CHeRI — a collaboration between the School of Medicine, Global Health Institute, Nicholas School of the Environment, and the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability — plans to use the funding for the next four years to support new and existing research initiatives. The health-climate relationship, Robert Tighe, director of CHeRI and associate professor of medicine, said is not an area that many researchers are actively investigating.
“It does require some effort to get people to start to think about how they might be impactful in this space,” he said.
A significant amount of the new funding will go toward CHeRI’s annual “Big Idea” symposiums beginning in January. At these symposiums, faculty and graduate students will present ideas for research and compete for funding based on set criteria. Unlike other research symposiums, participants will present proposals for ideas without a set research team or plan.
“It’s a little reverse from what we would normally do because it’s really just: ‘What’s your idea? What’s your concept? What’s the thing you want to study?’” Tighe said. “Then we’ll sort of figure out the team that can help support you and help to flesh out the idea.”
The new funding also allows CHeRI to support existing research projects including investigating how fungal growth, spores and toxins, in the wake of Hurricane Helene, are impacting human health in western North Carolina as well as studying how wildfire smoke affects immune response.
Tighe became particularly interested in the intersection of climate change and health after witnessing how rising temperatures and increased exposure to air pollution impacted the prevalence of lung disease in patients. Climate change has upended the progress achieved by recent regulations, Tighe said.
CHeRI’s roots trace back to March 2024 after Mary Klotman, executive vice president for health affairs and dean of the School of Medicine, tasked Tighe with leading a strategic working group to identify research topics focusing on climate change and health as part of the University’s broader Climate Commitment. After six months, the group outlined certain areas for research and subsequently applied for funding through the Duke Endowment.
Climate and health is one of the Climate Commitment’s focus areas for research which inspired CHeRI’s creation, explained Toddi Steelman, vice president and vice provost for climate and sustainability.
“As the world warms, all of us will be affected by rising temperatures and that gets down to basic biology and physiology of heat in how we react as humans,” Steelman said, adding that climate change could cause health problems like fungal infections, kidney failure, mosquito-borne diseases.
Researchers expect some communities will be more adversely impacted than others. The funding announcement specifically mentioned that the grant will go toward “identifying the groups most vulnerable to climate and health impacts in North Carolina and South Carolina,” particularly individuals living in low-income or rural communities. Steelman emphasized this focus is in line with the Climate Commitment.
“We know that the most vulnerable in our society, whether that’s here in the United States or globally, will be more severely affected by a changing climate because there are fewer resources to mitigate the risks that vulnerable populations will face,” Steelman said.
For both Steelman and Tighe, it was important that CHeRI was an interdisciplinary initiative to ensure that faculty and students involved in both health and environmental studies could combine their knowledge to conduct effective research.
“Climate change is sort of the mother of all collective action problems,” Steelman said. “… There’s a whole variety of disciplines that I think naturally start to coalesce if you are focused on real-world problems related to climate change and health.”
Tighe hopes that CHeRI’s interdisciplinary approach will ensure that researchers can quickly identify climate and health-related problems and discover solutions given the urgency of climate change.
“We don’t have 30 or 40 years to sort of go down the normal process of discovery that eventually leads to something. These are things that are happening right now,” he said.