Dr. Hupert is a physician and researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University (in New York City) who co-directs Cornell’s Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness. His research has focused mainly on public health and emergency response logistics, including for the COVID-19 pandemic: he helped create and is the Policy Lead for the University of Oxford-based COVID-19 International Modeling (CoMo) Consortium and served on the New York State COVID Modeling Task Force. Earlier, he served for 10 years as Senior Medical Advisor in the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Division of Preparedness and Emerging Infections, and was on the Scientific Advisory Board of the US National Institute of Health’s Modeling of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS). He now teaches about the uses of dynamic disease modeling and operations research modeling for health policy in the Weill Cornell graduate school and the Oxford Masters in Modeling for Global Health program. Clinically, he works as an internal medicine hospitalist at New York City’s Lower Manhattan Hospital, having trained at Harvard’s Medical School and School of Public Health, and at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a nature and urban photographer and an erstwhile rower.
To better incorporate extreme heat and people-centered disasters into U.S. emergency management, Congress and federal agencies should take several interrelated actions.
The undercounting of deaths related to extreme heat and other people-centered disasters — like extreme cold and smoke waves — hinders the political and public drive to address the problem.
To protect the health and well-being of the nation’s children, the federal government must facilitate efforts to collect the data required to drive extreme heat mitigation and adaptive capacity in the classroom.