Kirk Smith ()

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E-Mail:
krksmith@berkeley.edu
Website:
 
Interests:
Air, Water, Soil, Climate Change, Energy, Awareness-raising, Policy, Technologies
Discipline(s)
Environmental Studies, Public Health
Role(s):
Researcher
Location(s) of Work:
China, India, Nepal

Biography

Kirk R. Smith is Professor of Global Environmental Health and holds the Maxwell Endowed Chair in Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also founder and coordinator of the campus-wide Masters Program in Health, Environment, and Development. Previously, he was founder and head of the Energy Program of the East-West Center in Honolulu, where he still holds appointment as Adjunct Senior Fellow in Environment and Health after moving to Berkeley in 1995. He is also a Visiting Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. His research work focuses on environmental and health issues in developing countries, particularly those related to health-damaging and climate-changing air pollution, and includes ongoing field projects in India, China, Nepal, and Guatemala. He serves on a number of national and international scientific advisory boards including those for the Global Action Plan for Pneumonia, the Global Energy Assessment, and the WHO Air Quality Guidelines. He is on the editorial boards of a range of international journals and has published over 250 scientific articles and 7 books. He holds bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from UC Berkeley and, in 1997, was elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors awarded to US scientists by their peers.

Dr. Kirk R. Smith conducts research on environmental and health issues related to the process of economic development in poor areas of the world. Previously, his work focused on large-scale energy systems, such as nuclear power, and hazardous waste from industrialization. Currently, he focuses on air pollution, both in cities and in rural areas and both indoors and outdoors with a special but not exclusive focus on biomass fuel cycles. This work has involved laboratory measurements, field monitoring studies, and policy analysis. Since the 1990s he has been working with groups in several countries to conduct epidemiological studies of the health impacts of smoke from household use of solid fuels, a large source of exposure on a global scale, including the first randomized trial in air pollution history in Guatemala.

In the course of this work, he has developed new conceptual approaches to total exposure assessment and its use in regulatory policy. He has also explored new conceptual frameworks for comparative risk assessment for use in setting research and control priorities, showing the need for modifications of the approaches taken in the U.S. because of the special conditions in poor nations. Since the late 1980s, he has also been conducting research on greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries, again both at the level of field monitoring (India, China, Thailand, Brazil, and Kenya) and new concept and methods development for co-benefits, i.e., the simultaneous achievement of climate mitigation and development goals. His greenhouse gas work has also extended to policy by developing new indices of relative responsibility for greenhouse emissions (Natural Debt) that can be used in international negotiations.

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