Elena Craft
President, Health Effects Institute
Dr. Elena Craft is President of the Health Effects Institute (HEI), an independent research organization dedicated to advancing high-quality, impartial science on the health effects of air pollution. With a deep background in environmental health and toxicology, Dr. Craft leads HEI’s strategic efforts to inform air quality policy through evidence-based research — including critical work on emissions from transportation sources such as cars, trucks, and non-road engines. Under her leadership, HEI provides globally relevant science to guide public and private sector decisions in both developed and developing countries. Dr. Craft holds academic appointments at the University of Texas Health Science Center and Texas A&M University and is a Kinder Fellow at Rice University. She earned her Ph.D. from Duke University, a M.S. in toxicology from North Carolina State University, and a B.S. in biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also a Fellow of the Collegium Ramazzini.
Partner Session – Health Effects Institute
Room: Samberg Salon MI
The Health Effects Institute (HEI) was created in 1980 as a nonprofit corporation to address a need among government, industry, and other sectors for impartial science of the highest quality to inform policy decisions around motor vehicle emissions. HEI’s long-standing government-industry partnership, independent research model, and impartiality have allowed it to maintain credibility as it provides science to sponsors and other sectors often with competing interests. In this session, HEI’s rigorous model will be described; this model has been applied for more than four decades to yield credible research that has informed important health-protective policy decisions. A few examples of impactful HEI-funded research will be highlighted, and two HEI-funded investigators will present their research that was funded to investigate exposure to non-tailpipe particulate emissions and possible health effects associated with those emissions.
- HEI: A Model for Producing Impartial Science.
Speaker: Elena Craft, President, HEI - A History of Policy-Relevant Science.
Speaker: Ellen Mantus, Director of Science, HEI - Assessing the Impact of Non‐Tailpipe Emissions from Traffic on the Asthmatic Airway (IONA).
Speaker: Chris Griffiths, Queen Mary University of London - Improved Characterization of the Real‐World Contributions and Impacts of Non-tailpipe Particulate Matter Emissions.
Speaker: Greg Evans, University of Toronto - Q&A – Elena Craft, President, HEI