George Thurston, DSc, is director of the Program in Exposure Assessment and Human Health Effects at NYU School of Medicine, and is a leading scholar on the human health effects of air pollution.
His research has focused on health effects of air pollution in New York City, as well as in cities across the nation and around the world. In New York City, this has included his Backpack Study of the effect of diesel air pollution on children with asthma in the South Bronx. His research and collaborations in cities around the globe has included a study of the effects of industrial air pollution among children in Cubatao, Brazil. He was also an author of the World Health Organization Global Burden of Disease report, published in the Lancet in 2012, which provided global estimates of the life years lost due to outdoor fine particulate matter air pollution (PM2.5), which were based in large measure on Dr. Thurston's American Cancer Society cohort studies of PM2.5 air pollution and mortality, and his collaborative research in which global PM2.5 concentrations were estimated based on global satellite data.
