Air Pollution

We’re pleased to share the Health Effects Institute’s 2025 Annual Report: Expanding Our Vision for a Healthier Environment. This year’s report highlights the many initiatives, research, and programs that helped make 2025 such a successful year. This success comes from our sponsors, board and committee members, researchers, partners, collaborators, staff, and others who work to help provide impartial science to inform decisions that foster a healthier environment for all.

This report presents a study led by Patrick L. Kinney at the Boston University School of Public Health. Kinney and colleagues evaluated major national regulatory policies that were implemented in China between 2008 and 2019 to reduce air emissions. This study represents an impressive example of a large-scale accountability study that shows the effectiveness of implementing a suite of air pollution regulations.

This report presents a study led by Tanya L. Alderete, a recipient of HEI’s 2019 Walter A. Rosenblith New Investigator Award, at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. Alderete and colleagues examined whether prenatal or postnatal exposures to air pollution were associated with changes in the infant gut microbiome and fecal metabolome during the first 2 years of life.