Associate Professor Sylvia Brandt (resource economics and public policy) has been named one of seven 2014-2015 Family Research Scholars at the Center for Research on Families (CRF).
Each scholar receives time, technical expertise, mentorship and consultation with national experts as he or she prepares a significant research grant proposal. The program aims to bring together a diverse group of faculty from throughout the UMass community to foster innovation and collaboration across research areas related to the family.
One aspect of Brandt’s research focuses on how asthma affects a child’s quality of life. As a CRF scholar, she will be preparing a proposal titled “New Methods to Assess the Burden of Childhood Asthma in Massachusetts.” Brandt plans to work with a group of leading epidemiologists and policymakers in Massachusetts to develop a risk assessment of the burden of asthma onset due to pollution exposure.
In 2012, Brandt co-authored a paper titled “Costs of Childhood Asthma Due to Traffic-Related Pollution in Two California Communities” that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences named one of the top research papers of the year. The paper not only examined direct health care costs related to childhood asthma, as many previous analyses have done, but also calculated the indirect costs of caring for a child with asthma.
CRF’s mission is to increase research on family issues; build a multidisciplinary community of researchers who are studying issues of relevance to families; connect national and internationally prominent family researchers with UMass faculty and students; provide advanced data analytic methods training and consultation; and disseminate family research findings to scholars, families, practitioners and policymakers. The other 2014-2015 scholars are David Arnold (psychology); Gerald Downes (biology); Marsha Kline Pruett (Smith College School for Social Work); Tatishe Nteta (political science); Katherine Reeves (epidemiology); and Lisa Sanders (psychology).