University Affiliates

Carina Gronlund is an environmental epidemiologist and research assistant professor at the Institute for Social Research in the Social Environment and Health Program. In collaboration with state and Detroit government and Detroit community partners, she studies the separate and combined effects of climate change and air pollution and vulnerabilities by social, pre-existing health, and built environment characteristics. This research will help cities understand how to adapt to climate change.

She received her BA in Biology from the University of Chicago, with a specialization in Ecology and Evolution. Subsequently, she worked as a research assistant in the Clinical Trials Office at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, MI before pursing a Masters in Public Health at the University of Michigan. She completed her MPH in 2008 and then completed her PhD in 2013 in the University of Michigan Department of Environmental Health Sciences, where she was a National Institute on Aging Public Health and Aging trainee. Her dissertation focused on associations between high temperatures and hospital admissions and mortality among the elderly as well as sociodemographic and land cover characteristics that modify these associations. As a Graham Sustainability Institute Dow Postdoctoral Fellow, she studied vulnerability to the cardiovascular effects of high temperatures using longitudinal studies of cardiovascular risk from 7 U.S. cities.