Lara Cushing, Ph.D., MPH
Assistant Professor and Jonathan and Karin Fielding Presidential Chair in Health Equity
Institute of the Environment and Sustainability; Department of Environmental Health Sciences, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health
Pronouns: she / her / hers
Lara Cushing is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Jonathan and Karin Fielding Presidential Chair in Health Equity at UCLA. Her research focuses on patterns and consequences of social inequalities in exposure to environmental hazards in the U.S. She has assessed the health consequences of environmental and climate-related exposures for pregnant women and infants, and investigated questions of environmental justice in the context of air pollution and hazardous sites, urban greenspace and heat islands, oil and gas drilling, drinking water quality, and sea level rise. She is interested in analytical methods and regulatory frameworks to characterize the joint effects of environmental and social stressors to health that can inform efforts to reduce environmental health disparities.
She was a contributing author to the Fourth Assessment of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a former Environmental Fellow of the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation, and is a current JPB Environmental Health Fellow through the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public. Dr. Cushing earned her MPH in Epidemiology and PhD in Energy & Resources from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to UCLA, she served on the faculty at San Francisco State University from 2016-2020.