About
Josiah Kephart, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and the Urban Health Collaborative. Kephart joined the Dornsife School of Public Health as part of the Drexel FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program.
Kephart is an environmental epidemiologist who seeks to understand and mitigate the environmental determinants of health disparities. After working in community health in Philadelphia and Honduras, he received an MPH and PhD in exposure science and environmental epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
His early research focused on designing and implementing randomized controlled trials of interventions to reduce household air pollution and improve cardiopulmonary health among women in indigenous Aymara communities in Peru. With the support of a Fogarty Global Health Fellowship, his research has provided novel evidence of hazardous emissions from gas stoves, which are widely promoted and distributed to low-resource households in the Global South as a “clean” alternative fuel.
Kephart's recent research focuses on understanding the contribution of climate change, air pollution, and the urban environment to health disparities in Latin America and the U.S. By leveraging the tools of environmental and social epidemiology, his research aims to understand the impacts of large-scale environmental exposures, including extreme heat, air pollution, and floods on health and health inequities at the population level.