About

Jason Hill is a Professor in the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He also serves as a Resident Fellow of the University’s Institute on the Environment. His research focuses on the consequences of food, energy, agriculture, and natural resource use from a life-cycle perspective. Dr. Hill has testified before U.S. House and Senate Committees on the environmental effects of transportation biofuels. His work has been published in prominent journals such as Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has served on the National Research Council’s Committee on the Economic and Environmental Impacts of Increasing Biofuels Production and on the United States Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board’s Biogenic Carbon Advisory Panel. Dr. Hill holds an AB in Biology from Harvard College and a PhD in Plant Biological Sciences from the University of Minnesota.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Geography
• Medicine
• Environmental health
• Biology
• Political Science
• Meteorology
• Ecology
• Waste management
• Business
• Engineering
• Environmental protection
• Agronomy
• Natural resource economics
• Economics
• Physics
• Agricultural economics
• Demography
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Air quality-related human health damages of wild capture seafood production in the United States

  Environmental Research Food Systems · 2025-01-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Exposure to air pollution is the greatest environmental health risk factor for mortality in the United States and globally, to which food production is a major contributor. Recent studies have estimated the human health impacts of air pollution from terrestrial livestock and crop production, but those of seafood production, which is an important component of many diets, are largely unknown. Here, we estimate the air quality-related human health damages of wild capture fisheries production in the United States via the emission and formation of particulate matter (PM 2.5 ). We quantify annual deaths attributable to primary and secondary PM 2.5 from commercial marine vessel emissions using county- and species-specific fishing activity and landings data. We find that, on average, wild caught seafood production is a low air quality-related health impact source of protein, with mortality health impacts 58× less than chicken, 321× less than pork, and 484× less than beef per gram of protein. The air quality-related health impacts of seafood vary widely by species and by fishing activity location. Notably, the highest impact seafood-based sources of protein production tend to be far less damaging than terrestrial animal-based sources of protein and are comparable to plant-based proteins, largely mirroring previously described broader trends for the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of these various protein sources. Our work suggests that as global protein demand rises, shifting diets towards increased seafood consumption to meet nutritional protein requirements may offer potentially large reductions in environmentally driven harm to human health relative to terrestrial animal-based proteins.

  PublisherDOI

• Equity and modeling in sustainability science: Examples and opportunities throughout the process

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-03-18 · 49 citations

  articleOpen access

  Equity is core to sustainability, but current interventions to enhance sustainability often fall short in adequately addressing this linkage. Models are important tools for informing action, and their development and use present opportunities to center equity in process and outcomes. This Perspective highlights progress in integrating equity into systems modeling in sustainability science, as well as key challenges, tensions, and future directions. We present a conceptual framework for equity in systems modeling, focused on its distributional, procedural, and recognitional dimensions. We discuss examples of how modelers engage with these different dimensions throughout the modeling process and from across a range of modeling approaches and topics, including water resources, energy systems, air quality, and conservation. Synthesizing across these examples, we identify significant advances in enhancing procedural and recognitional equity by reframing models as tools to explore pluralism in worldviews and knowledge systems; enabling models to better represent distributional inequity through new computational techniques and data sources; investigating the dynamics that can drive inequities by linking different modeling approaches; and developing more nuanced metrics for assessing equity outcomes. We also identify important future directions, such as an increased focus on using models to identify pathways to transform underlying conditions that lead to inequities and move toward desired futures. By looking at examples across the diverse fields within sustainability science, we argue that there are valuable opportunities for mutual learning on how to use models more effectively as tools to support sustainable and equitable futures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Air quality, health, and equity impacts of vehicle electrification in India

  Environmental Research Letters · 2024-01-09 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Ambient air pollution in India accounts for 870 000 deaths per year, including 43 000 from road transportation. Vehicle electrification could posit a sustainable solution. However, 3/4th of India’s electric grid is powered by coal, emitting large amounts of PM 2.5 , SO 2 , and NO x . This leads to uncertainty regarding the health benefits and distributional consequences from vehicle electrification. Our results show that if electric vehicles made up 30% of vehicle kilometers traveled, there would be 1000–2000 additional deaths each year under present day conditions. Higher increases in pollution exposure are seen in scheduled castes/tribes, poor, and rural populations particularly in high coal production states. Switching to net zero-emitting electricity generation for charging would reduce air pollution attributable deaths by 6000–7000 annually and PM 2.5 exposure across all groups of population.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Air pollution mortality from India’s coal power plants: unit-level estimates for targeted policy

  Environmental Research Letters · 2024-05-03 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Air pollution from coal-fired electricity generation is an important cause of premature mortality in India. Although pollution-related mortality from the sector has been extensively studied, the relative contribution of individual coal-fired units to the fleet-wide mortality burden remains unclear. Here, we find that emissions from a small number of units drive overall mortality. Units producing just 3.5% of total generation and constituting less than 3% of total capacity result in 25% of annual premature mortality from coal-fired generation. This is a direct consequence of the 200-fold variation that we find in the mortality intensity of electricity generation across units. We use a detailed emissions inventory, a reduced complexity air quality model, and non-linear PM 2.5 concentration-response functions to estimate marginal premature mortality for over 500 units operational in 2019. Absolute annual mortality ranges from less than 1 to over 650 deaths/year across units, and the mortality intensity of generation varies from under 0.002 to 0.43 deaths/GWh. Our findings suggest the potential for large social benefits in the form of reduced PM 2.5 -related premature mortality in India if the highest mortality intensity units are prioritized for the implementation of pollution control technologies or accelerated retirement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Figure S8 from A Somatostatin Receptor Subtype-3 (SST<sub>3</sub>) Peptide Agonist Shows Antitumor Effects in Experimental Models of Nonfunctioning Pituitary Tumors

  2023-03-31

  preprintOpen access

  <p>Direct effect of BIM-355 at different doses on tumor growth in POMC-KO mice model.</p>

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Figure S3 from A Somatostatin Receptor Subtype-3 (SST<sub>3</sub>) Peptide Agonist Shows Antitumor Effects in Experimental Models of Nonfunctioning Pituitary Tumors

  2023-03-31

  preprintOpen access

  <p>mRNA expression levels of SST3 in different pituitary neuroendocrine tumors (PitNETs) and NPs.</p>

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Supplementary Data from ARQ 197, a Novel and Selective Inhibitor of the Human c-Met Receptor Tyrosine Kinase with Antitumor Activity

  2023-03-31

  preprintOpen access

  Supplementary Data from ARQ 197, a Novel and Selective Inhibitor of the Human c-Met Receptor Tyrosine Kinase with Antitumor Activity

  PublisherDOI

• Generative adversarial networks for real-time realistic physics simulations

  2023-06-12

  articleSenior author

  Lynntech is seeking to develop real-time realistic nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM) physics-based simulations, and automated data reduction/analysis methods, for large datasets. Recently, computational efficient Neural Network based simulations have demonstrated the possibility to synthesize data with an orders-of-magnitude increase in speed compared to standard computational techniques [1,2]. In this contribution, we report our initial experimental results for our Generative Adversarial Network for Realistic Physics Simulations, or GAN4RPS.

  PublisherDOI

• Reply to Muzzioli et al.: Communicating nutrition and environmental information to food system stakeholders

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023-04-17

  letterOpen access

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Life Cycle Analysis of Biofuels

  Elsevier eBooks · 2023-10-04 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Christopher W. Tessum

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  56 shared

• Julian Marshall

  Seattle University

  48 shared

• Gérald Raverot

  28 shared

• Alexandre Vasiljevic

  28 shared

• Alejandro Ibáñez‐Costa

  Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red

  26 shared

• Mari C. Vázquez‐Borrego

  26 shared

• Raúl M. Luque

  26 shared

• Justo P. Castaño

  Instituto Maimónides de Investigación Biomédica de Córdoba

  26 shared

Education

• PhD, Plant Biological Sciences

  University of Minnesota

  2004

• AB, Biology

  Harvard College

  1997

Awards & honors

• Distinguished McKnight University Professor