Public Health in the Age of AI and Climate Change

April 7, 2025

As environmental exposures like air pollution and wildfire smoke become increasingly common, the effects on human health are often difficult to track and even harder to predict. But in a powerful fusion of technology and public health, Suzanne Tamang, PhD, is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) and one of the largest medical databases in the country to uncover how these exposures impact autoimmune and rheumatic diseases – and to build better systems of care.

Tamang, an Assistant Professor at Stanford and a computer scientist, partners with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to study a critical population: U.S. veterans. Veterans often experience a unique constellation of exposures and vulnerabilities, making them an ideal group for understanding how environmental stressors intersect with chronic illness. Tamang’s work sits at this intersection, where climate, community, and chronic disease meet.

At the core of her research is a natural language processing (NLP) system capable of scanning over a million clinical notes a day. Patient records often contain rich, detailed information – about social conditions, occupational exposures, and health risks – that isn’t captured in standard medical codes. Her NLP model is able to extract and analyze these unstructured data, surfacing patterns that were previously invisible to researchers.

In collaboration with MDClone, a data analytics company, Tamang has taken this work a step further by generating synthetic patient populations. These are not real patients, but AI-generated representations built from real data. By preserving the statistical patterns of real-world patient information – without compromising any individual’s privacy – these synthetic datasets open the door to powerful new kinds of public health research.

“It was derived from real veterans, although it’s synthetic,” she says. “It’s a new method, based on generative AI, and it allows us to bring in environmental data to explore different ways to link it to population health.”