Data scientist recognized for her contributions to improving air quality
TIME has named Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Faculty Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, to the inaugural 2024 TIME100 Health list in recognition for her groundbreaking contributions to global health.
The TIME100 list, first established in 1999, recognizes the activism, innovation, and achievement of the most influential individuals in the world each year. TIME100 Health is a new annual list of the 100 individuals who have most influenced global health.
“I am honored to be recognized on this new list,” said Dominici. “I cannot thank enough all of the students, postdocs, and collaborators that have worked with me tirelessly, and with enormous enthusiasm, to minimize the climate crisis’ adverse impacts on health and to use data science to find climate adaptation solutions.”
Dominici’s research focuses on building AI-ready data platforms and developing causally aware AI approaches to identify ways to prevent death and disease from exposure to environmental contaminants and climate-related stressors. She leads several interdisciplinary groups of scientists exploring questions in environmental health science, climate change, cancer research, and health policy. As Faculty Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI), she leads several University-wide research programs and activities to advance data science and leverage it to analyze the current breakdown of trust in scientific research. HDSI’s programs include a large postdoctoral fellows program that draws outstanding early-career scholars from diverse disciplines as well as the AWS Impact Computing Project, a collaboration with Amazon Web Services that advances innovative solutions to global challenges such as climate change, health inequity, and food insecurity.
Dominici has been named to the TIME100 Health list following her own recent research on using data science to inform US air quality policy, which directly impacted the February 7, 2024 revisions of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. The revised standards will result in significant public health net benefits that could be worth as much as $46 billion by 2032. In addition to this work, Dominici is currently leading a large group of data scientists in building causally aware AI models trained on claims data from across the entire US health care system. Their goal is to identify solutions for climate adaptation and ways of reducing the energy sector’s carbon footprint and adverse health impacts in the US and around the world.
In 2015, Dominici was recognized on the Thomson Reuters 2015 Highly Cited Researchers list as one of the top 1 percent of scientists cited in her field; in 2017, she was named one of the ten Italian women scientists with the largest global impact in the biomedical sciences. Throughout her career, she has demonstrated a commitment to promoting diversity in academia, chairing the University Committee for the Advancement of Women Faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and earning both the Jane L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences and the Florence Nightingale David Award. Prior to Harvard, she was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She earned degrees from University La Sapienza and the University of Padua.
The full TIME100 Health list will be featured in the May 13, 2024 issue of TIME, available on newsstands on Friday, May 3.