AWS Public Sector Blog
Author: Christa Hasenkopf
Christa Hasenkopf is the director and co‐founder of OpenAQ, a tech non-profit sharing half a billion data points from over 90 countries and convening a global community around them. Hasenkopf fell in love with open data as a mechanism for change in 2011, after launching an open air quality data effort in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Hasenkopf is an adjunct professor at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins University. Previously, Hasenkopf was the first chief air pollution advisor to the medical director at the U.S. Department of State and an American Association for the Advancement of Science S&T Fellow at USAID. She is a former Fulbright Scholar, Echoing Green Fellow, and Teach for America corps member. Hasenkopf received a PhD in atmospheric & oceanic sciences from the University of Colorado and a Bachelors in astronomy & astrophysics from the Pennsylvania State University.
Enabling rapid COVID-19 and air pollution analysis across the globe with OpenAQ and AWS
Unravelling the relationship between COVID-19 and air pollution is vital for protecting public health. For example, preliminary works suggest that those living in environments with polluted air are significantly more likely to be adversely affected by COVID-19. At the same time, air pollution is already known to cause an estimated one out of every eight deaths globally. The decrease in human activities due to COVID-19 lockdowns across the world has people wondering how air pollution levels are being impacted—and what valuable public health and policy lessons we can learn.