About

Chris Lim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Zuckerman College of Public Health. His research examines how the environment impacts human health by applying epidemiologic, statistical, and data science methods. Specifically, he focuses on the health effects of air pollution and climate change, and investigates disparities in exposures and associated health outcomes. Lim explores the potential application of low-cost sensor technologies for personal-level exposure assessment, urban air pollution modeling, and community-based environmental justice projects. He currently leads studies examining the health and academic impact of green playground renovations in New York City public schools and the impact of air pollution on pediatric asthma in Tucson schools. Lim completed his postdoctoral training at the Yale School of the Environment and obtained his PhD from NYU School of Medicine. His work emphasizes environmental epidemiology with a focus on air pollution, greenspaces, and built environment exposures in relation to health outcomes such as cancer incidence and survival.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Environmental health
• Environmental science
• Geography
• Sociology
• Environmental protection
• Statistics
• Mathematics
• Meteorology
• Environmental engineering
• Demography
• Chemistry
• Socioeconomics

Selected publications

• The roles of residential greenness in the association between air pollution and health: a systematic review

  Environmental Research Letters · 2021 · 49 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Environmental health
  • Medicine

  While a growing body of literature suggests beneficial impacts of greenness on several health outcomes, relatively few studies have examined greenness as an effect modifier to impacts of air pollution on health outcomes, and results from the existing studies are inconclusive. We performed a comprehensive, systematic review of previous literature on greenness as a potential effect modifier for associations between particulate matter air pollution and health. After initial screening of 7814 studies, we identified 20 eligible studies. We summarized findings on study characteristics based on several criteria: health outcome, air pollution exposure, source of air pollution data, study location, study period, and median year of the study period. We evaluated characteristics of effect modification by greenness on air pollution and health associations based on the number of greenness metrics applied, type of greenness metric (e.g. normalized difference vegetation index, land use), data source for greenness, and spatial resolution and buffer size. We also summarized evidence for effect modification by greenness based on strength and direction of evidence for each study and overall evidence of effect modification by greenness by several study characteristics. Our systematic review showed that only a limited number of studies have been conducted on greenness as an effect modifier for air pollution-health associations. We found differences in several study characteristics such as greenness assessment (e.g. greenness metrics applied, spatial resolution, and data sources) across studies. Collectively, the studies provide suggestive evidence for the hypothesis that areas with high greenness have lower impacts of air pollution on health, although some studies reported inconsistent findings. The findings from our review provide valuable knowledge on how greenness affects associations between air pollution and health and could help identify critical areas for future study.

  DOI

• Relationships between Local Green Space and Human Mobility Patterns during COVID-19 for Maryland and California, USA

  Sustainability · 2020 · 47 citations

  • Sociology
  • Geography
  • Demography

  Human mobility is a significant factor for disease transmission. Little is known about how the environment influences mobility during a pandemic. The aim of this study was to investigate an effect of green space on mobility reductions during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Maryland and California, USA. For 230 minor civil divisions (MCD) in Maryland and 341 census county divisions (CCD) in California, we obtained mobility data from Facebook Data for Good aggregating information of people using the Facebook app on their mobile phones with location history active. The users’ movement between two locations was used to calculate the number of users that traveled into an MCD (or CCD) for each day in the daytime hours between 11 March and 26 April 2020. Each MCD’s (CCD’s) vegetation level was estimated as the average Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) level for 1 January through 31 March 2020. We calculated the number of state and local parks, food retail establishments, and hospitals for each MCD (CCD). Results showed that the daily percent changes in the number of travels declined during the study period. This mobility reduction was significantly lower in Maryland MCDs with state parks (p-value = 0.045), in California CCDs with local-scale parks (p-value = 0.048). EVI showed no association with mobility in both states. This finding has implications for the potential impacts of green space on mobility under an outbreak. Future studies are needed to explore these findings and to investigate changes in health effects of green space during a pandemic.

  DOI

• Reductions in mortality resulting from reduced air pollution levels due to COVID-19 mitigation measures

  The Science of The Total Environment · 2020 · 73 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Environmental health
  • Environmental protection
  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• George Thurston

  New York University

  21 shared

• Christoph Mathys

  14 shared

• Michelle L. Bell

  University of Washington

  13 shared

• Eren Kafadar

  11 shared

• Kelvin C. Fong

  Milken Institute

  11 shared

• Albert R. Powers

  11 shared

• Seulkee Heo

  Yale University

  10 shared

• Catalina Mourgues

  Yale University

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Dean's Fund for Excellence
• Alumni Giving Circle
• 25th Anniversary Gala Sponsorship Opportunities
• Dean's Annual Fund Application
• Dean's Students Research Funds

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