About Me

Emma is interested in exploring how we can promote the health of people and the environment in a changing world. She is currently purusing her PhD in Environment and Resources at Stanford University and studies how changes to the environment impact human health, environmental quality, and ecosystem services.

Prior to starting her PhD, Emma worked as a Research Analyst at the Global Policy Lab (GPL) at UC Berkeley (now at Stanford). During her time at GPL, she was part of a project that aimed to identify land-based sources of nonpoint source water pollution in national-scale river systems in New Zealand and the US Mississippi River Basin. Emma completed her MPH in environmental health science and global health at Columbia University and received a BA in behavioral neuroscience from Colgate University.

When she isn’t at her desk, you can find her outside - most likely running or hiking up a mountain. She also co-founded a trivia company and loves to host trivia nights to bring communities together.

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Interests
  • planetary and human health
  • disease ecology
  • environmental pollution
  • ecosystem services
  • environmental data science
  • causal inference
  • machine learning
  • risk exposure assessment
Education

  • PhD in Environment & Resources

    Stanford University

  • MPH in Environmental Health Sciences, Global Health Certificate

    Columbia University

  • BA in Behavioral Neuroscience, Biology minor

    Colgate University

📚🤓💻🌎 Research
My research aims to measure, value, and predict the impacts of global environmental change on our ecosystems, environmental quality, and human health. I leverage different types and scales of data, including field collected ecological data to remotely sensed data to epidemiological data on human health outcomes. I relate these datasets together by drawing on methods and tools from various disciplines, such as machine learning, causal inference, epidemiology, and exposure assessment. My current research focuses on how changes to air quality, land use, and water quality, which are three resources that are critical to the functioning of healthy ecosystems have consequences for both the environment and human health. I am co-advised by Erin Mordecai and Marshall Burke, and I am a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, a Stanford EDGE Fellow, and a Stanford Data Science Scholar.
Publications
The influence of wildfire smoke on ambient chemical species concentrations in the contiguous US
Air Quality, Public Health, Wildfire Smoke

The influence of wildfire smoke on ambient chemical species concentrations in the contiguous US

Wildfire risk is growing in the US and many other parts of the world, with demonstrable impact on surface air quality. We use daily measurements from 700 monitors around the US over 15 years to characterize the chemical species present in wildfire smoke, quantify how changing wildfire smoke concentrations are affecting observed species concentrations, and estimate health risks from exposure. We find that increases in wildfire smoke lead to measurable increases in over two dozen chemical species' concentrations and that this influence has grown over time for many species. We show that the burning of structures significantly elevates specific chemical concentrations in smoke and that wildfire enhancement of carcinogenic species could lead to small increases in population cancer risk.

Harmonized nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin from 1980 to 2018
The effect of large-scale anti-contagion policies on the COVID-19 pandemic
Recent work
Emma Krasovich Southworth, Minghao Qiu, Carlos Gould, Ayako Kawano, Jeff Wen, Sam Heft-Neal, Kara Kilpatrick Voss, Alandra Lopez, Scott Fendorf, Jennifer Burney, Marshall Burke (2024). The influence of wildfire smoke on ambient chemical species concentrations in the contiguous US.
Preprint link
Emma Krasovich Southworth, Peiley Lau, Jeanette Tseng, Julia Longmate, Kendon Bell, Solomon Hsiang (2022). Harmonized nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin from 1980 to 2018. Sci Data.
Cite Code Dataset Link to article
Solomon Hsiang, Daniel Allen, Sébastien Annan-Phan, Kendon Bell, Ian Bolliger, Trinetta Chong, Hannah Druckenmiller, Luna Yue Huang, Andrew Hultgren, Emma Krasovich Southworth, Peiley Lau, Jaechol Lee, Esther Rolf, Jeanette Tseng, Tiffany Wu (2020). The effect of large-scale anti-contagion policies on the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature.
Cite Code Dataset DOI Read the full paper