Lara Cushing


Assistant Professor

Department of Environmental Health Science,
University of California, Los Angeles

Fellowship Project: From the city to the cell: neighborhood determinants of adverse birth outcomes

Lara Cushing has expertise in environmental health disparities, spatial data analysis, climate change, and epidemiology. Lara’s research focuses on social inequalities in exposure to environmental hazards, and race and class determinants of environmental health disparities. Her work has investigated questions of environmental justice in the context of residential proximity to hazardous facilities, prenatal exposures to harmful man-made chemicals, urban greenspace, and global climate change. She is interested in the combined contributions of environmental and social stressors to inequalities in health and has contributed to the development of regulatory tools such as the California Environmental Protection Agency’s that seek to better incorporate social equity concerns into environmental policy and decision-making.

Lara received her PhD from the Energy & Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 and an M.P.H. in Epidemiology, also from UC Berkeley, in 2011.