Joshua Apte

About

Joshua Apte is an assistant professor jointly appointed in the School of Public Health and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. His research investigates human exposure to air pollution, focusing on issues from the neighborhood scale to the global scale. His work encompasses air pollution, atmospheric aerosols, exposure assessment, risk assessment, environmental justice, environmental engineering, environmental sensors, climate change mitigation, and environmental issues in developing countries. Apte holds an ScB in Environmental Science from Brown University and both MS and PhD degrees in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley. Prior to his current position, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering from 2015 to 2020.

Research topics

• Geography
• Environmental science
• Medicine
• Environmental health
• Political Science
• Meteorology
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Atmospheric sciences
• Geology

Selected publications

• PM _2.5 polluters disproportionately and systemically affect people of color in the United States

  Science Advances · 2021 · 574 citations

  exposure disparity experienced by people of color. We identify the most inequitable emission source types by state and city, thereby highlighting potential opportunities for addressing this persistent environmental inequity.

  DOI

• Historical Redlining Is Associated with Present-Day Air Pollution Disparities in U.S. Cities

  Environmental Science & Technology Letters · 2022 · 425 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  are substantially larger by historical HOLC grade than they are by race and ethnicity. However, within each HOLC grade, racial and ethnic air pollution exposure disparities persist, indicating that redlining was only one of the many racially discriminatory policies that impacted communities. Our findings illustrate how redlining, a nearly 80-year-old racially discriminatory policy, continues to shape systemic environmental exposure disparities in the United States.

  DOI

• Reducing Mortality from Air Pollution in the United States by Targeting Specific Emission Sources

  Environmental Science & Technology Letters · 2020 · 157 citations

  Air quality in the United States has dramatically improved, yet exposure to air pollution is still associated with 100000–200000 deaths annually. Reducing the number of deaths effectively, efficiently, and equitably relies on attributing them to specific emission sources, but so far, this has been done for only highly aggregated groups of sources, or a select few sources of interest. Here, we estimate mortality in the United States attributable to all domestic, human-caused emissions of primary…

  DOI

• Air quality policy should quantify effects on disparities

  Science · 2023 · 63 citations

  New tools can guide US policies to better target and reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities in air pollution exposure

  PublisherDOI

• Biogenic and anthropogenic contributions to urban terpenoid fluxes

  Atmospheric chemistry and physics · 2025-11-10 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract. Terpenoids influence atmospheric chemistry through rapid oxidation reactions which form secondary products including ozone and secondary organic aerosols (SOA). Source apportionment of terpenoids is complicated in urban environments because there are biogenic and anthropogenic sources. This study utilizes measured fluxes of isoprene, monoterpenes, and sesquiterpenes with MEGAN, a biogenic emissions model, and FIVE-VCP, an anthropogenic emissions inventory, to characterize urban terpeno…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julian Marshall

  Seattle University

  92 shared

• Allen L. Robinson

  Carnegie Mellon University

  44 shared

• Shahzad Gani

  The University of Texas at Austin

  43 shared

• Lea Hildebrandt Ruiz

  The University of Texas at Austin

  41 shared

• Sahil Bhandari

  Environmental Defense Fund

  38 shared

• Gazala Habib

  Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

  38 shared

• Michael Bräuer

  University of Washington

  32 shared

• Christopher W. Tessum

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  28 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

• Justin Remaish-38
• Ajay Pillarisettih-29
• Ayesha Mahmudh-28