Cassandra Thiel

About

Dr. Cassandra Thiel is an Assistant Professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service with a joint appointment at the NYU Langone School of Medicine in the Department of Population Health. Her research focuses on systematically measuring and analyzing environmental inefficiencies in medical services and built infrastructures to optimize these systems. She utilizes sustainable engineering tools, such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and industrial ecology, to improve hospitals, healthcare delivery, and medical waste streams. Her background includes a PhD in Civil Engineering with an emphasis on Sustainable Healthcare and Green Buildings from the University of Pittsburgh. As a 2014-2015 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellow, she collaborated with ophthalmologists at Aravind Eye Hospitals in India and conducted a cost and life cycle assessment of high-volume cataract surgery. Her experience at Aravind led to a postdoctoral position at the University of Pittsburgh, where she conducted and compared environmental and cost assessments of cataract surgeries in the US and India, and recommended policy changes regarding material use in US ophthalmic surgery. She is also partnered with orthopedic surgeons at the University of Pittsburgh to run clinical trials of environmental interventions aimed at reducing waste in hand surgery.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Environmental planning
• Process management
• Medical emergency

Selected publications

• The Green Print: Advancement of Environmental Sustainability in Healthcare

  Resources Conservation and Recycling · 2020 · 305 citations

  DOI

• Transforming The Medical Device Industry: Road Map To A Circular Economy

  Health Affairs · 2020 · 240 citations

  A circular economy involves maintaining manufactured products in circulation, distributing resource and environmental costs over time and with repeated use. In a linear supply chain, manufactured products are used once and discarded. In high-income nations, health care systems increasingly rely on linear supply chains composed of single-use disposable medical devices. This has resulted in increased health care expenditures and health care-generated waste and pollution, with associated public hea…

  DOI

• Climate change and global health: A call to more research and more action

  Allergy · 2022 · 156 citations

  There is increasing understanding, globally, that climate change and increased pollution will have a profound and mostly harmful effect on human health. This review brings together international experts to describe both the direct (such as heat waves) and indirect (such as vector-borne disease incidence) health impacts of climate change. These impacts vary depending on vulnerability (i.e., existing diseases) and the international, economic, political, and environmental context. This unique revie…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Telemedicine and the environment: life cycle environmental emissions from in-person and virtual clinic visits

  npj Digital Medicine · 2023 · 79 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Concern over climate change is growing in the healthcare space, and telemedicine has been rapidly expanding since the start of the COVID19 pandemic. Understanding the various sources of environmental emissions from clinic visits-both virtual and in-person-will help create a more sustainable healthcare system. This study uses a Life Cycle Assessment with retrospective clinical data from Stanford Health Care (SHC) in 2019-2021 to determine the environmental emissions associated with in-person and…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Grand Challenges in global eye health: a global prioritisation process using Delphi method

  The Lancet Healthy Longevity · 2022 · 51 citations

  BACKGROUND: We undertook a Grand Challenges in Global Eye Health prioritisation exercise to identify the key issues that must be addressed to improve eye health in the context of an ageing population, to eliminate persistent inequities in health-care access, and to mitigate widespread resource limitations. METHODS: Drawing on methods used in previous Grand Challenges studies, we used a multi-step recruitment strategy to assemble a diverse panel of individuals from a range of disciplines relevant…

  DOI

Recent grants

• Sustainable Healthcare Workshop

  NSF · $50k · 2018–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Alan L. Robin

  Johns Hopkins University

  33 shared

• Melissa M. Bilec

  University of Pittsburgh

  32 shared

• Rengaraj Venkatesh

  Aravind Eye Hospital

  30 shared

• Aravind Haripriya

  L V Prasad Eye Institute

  25 shared

• Pradeep Y. Ramulu

  25 shared

• Ashish M. Khodifad

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  25 shared

• Suzanne W. van Landingham

  Visual Sciences (United States)

  25 shared

• Amy E. Landis

  17 shared

Education

• PhD, Civil and Environmental Engineering

  University of Pittsburgh

  2013

• BS, Civil Engineering

  Michigan Technological University

  2009

Awards & honors

• 2014-2015 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellen…

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