Research Seminar: Brake and Tire Wear

Background
With increasing market share of zero emission vehicles in California and reductions of tailpipe emissions, non-combustion sources have become the dominating source of traffic emissions. Non-combustion sources of traffic emissions include brake and tire wear. Emissions studies have been conducted on vehicular non-combustion emissions through various study designs, including ambient measurements, laboratory modeling, and on-road sampling. Studies have been conducted on the metal contents and size distribution of brake and tire wear particles dispersed in the near-road environment. It is important to reassess these emissions as the vehicle fleet changes. However, no study has been conducted to examine health impacts from brake and tire wear PM metals.

This study examined the distribution of PM metals associated with brake and tire wear and their ability to produce oxidative stress in the body and used this information to model PM metals and determine their association with birth outcomes and placental health outcomes in the Los Angeles area using health data funded by other sources. Health effects studies included placental abnormalities and function and birth outcomes in an ongoing NIH-funded study of 161 pregnant women in Los Angeles and pre-term births and low birth weight in 285,614 live births in Los Angeles County from 2017-2019 from publicly available data.

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Biography
Dr. Michael Jerrett, is an internationally recognized expert in Geographic Information Science for Exposure Assessment and Spatial Epidemiology. He is a full professor in the Department of Environmental Health Science, and Director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. Dr. Jerrett earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Toronto. Over the past 23 years, Dr. Jerrett has researched how to characterize population exposures to air pollution and built environmental variables, the social distribution of these exposures among different groups, and how to assess the health effects from environmental exposures. He has worked for many years on how the built environment affects exposures and health, particularly the role of parks and green spaces on physical activity promotion and obesity prevention. He has published extensively on climate change, including wildfires, vulnerability to heat stress, and public health co-benefits of climate mitigation. He serves as a standing member of the Health Effects Institute Review Committee, as an editorial board member for the Annual Review of Public Health, and he recently completed a 3-year term on the Geographical Sciences Committee of the U.S. National Academy of Science.