The Salata Institute funds five new research projects

The Salata Institute Seed Grant Program in Climate and Sustainability funds nascent research projects that use novel or interdisciplinary approaches to combat climate change. Launched in Spring 2023 with a generous gift from the Troper Wojcicki Foundation, the program has made 62 awards over ten funding cycles for a total of nearly $1.3M. Faculty from nearly all of Harvard’s Schools have received funding to pursue an array of challenges.

Projects funded in academic year 2025-2026 included:

Evaluating climate co-benefits of U.S. air quality regulations

Principal Investigators: Francesca Dominici and Veronica Ballerini, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

This project assesses whether U.S. air quality rules aimed at protecting health also delivered climate co-benefits by reducing CO2 emissions – a dimension that’s often overlooked when most analyses focus on health gains and economic benefits. Focusing on the nationwide PM2.5 air quality standard and its initial enforcement after 2005, the team is building a public, state-level dataset and use causal inference methods for time-series to estimate how much CO2 emissions were reduced because of the standard, by sector and by state, and then test how sensitive the results are to confounding by systematically evaluating 209 concurrent regulations.

All data pipelines and code will be shared publicly to support replication and follow-on work. The findings could carry important policy implications for how air quality standards are designed and justified in future.

Tracing mercury from gold mining in the Amazon

Principal Investigators: Scot Martin, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Elsie Sunderland Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

This project tackles a major health risk in the Brazilian Amazon: mercury pollution linked to artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Some of the mercury released during mining is microbially converted into methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin that accumulates in fish – a staple food for many river communities. A puzzle is that some of the highest mercury levels in fish and people are reported far from active mining sites, suggesting that river chemistry and seasonal conditions (not just how much mercury is emitted) control when and where mercury becomes bioavailable.

This team is studying the Rio Madeira, a major Amazon tributary heavily influenced by gold mining, by sampling water, sediments, and commonly eaten fish at 15 sites during both wet and dry seasons in 2026. Using mercury “fingerprints” (stable isotopes) alongside measurements of river chemistry, they will identify how much mercury comes from mining versus background sources and pinpoint the environmental conditions that drive mercury’s conversion into methylmercury and its movement into the food web. The goal is actionable evidence to assist better target monitoring and mitigation for the communities most at risk.

Extreme heat and childbirth complications

Principal Investigators: Katherine Semrau, Megan Marx Delaney, and Shruthi Mahalingaiah, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

This project examines how extreme heat shapes childbirth outcomes in low- and middle-income settings, and how accounting for heat can strengthen climate adaptation in maternal care. The team is combining modeled heat exposure (temperature and humidity) with patient-level data from ~160,000 mother–newborn pairs in Uttar Pradesh, India, to quantify how heat may influence outcomes such as maternal mortality, stillbirth, early neonatal mortality, and key morbidities.

The goal is to estimate the potential impact of heat on study results and, in turn, inform how important heat-related antenatal and childbirth-care interventions should be – while producing a de-identified dataset and guidance for future trials.

Judicial dialogues on health and climate change

Principal Investigator: I. Glenn Cohen, Harvard Law School

Over the past decade, climate change has shifted from being approached primarily as an environmental problem addressed through multilateral diplomacy to becoming an increasingly complex human rights and public health challenge contested within judicial arenas. This two-day convening will bring together judges, litigators, and scholars from Africa, Europe, and Latin America to compare what’s emerging in different legal systems and what it means in practice.

Hosted by Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center with partners across Harvard and abroad, the event will dig into new legal standards and the real-world challenges courts face when they’re asked to rule on climate-related health harms – especially when those harms fall most heavily on marginalized communities.

Migration, genetics, and climate change adaptation

Principal investigator: Charles Taylor, Harvard Kennedy School

This project asks whether our genetic backgrounds help explain why climate and weather affect some people’s health more than others – above and beyond factors like income, infrastructure, or the climate people are used to. Using the UK Biobank (genotype data, health records, and residential histories for 500,000 people), the team is working to link each participant’s locations to detailed climate data and test whether living in a climate that differs from one’s ancestral climate is associated with higher risks of negative health outcomes like cardiovascular disease, vitamin D deficiency, and skin cancer.

They’re also looking at what happens during short-term weather swings: for example, whether people with ancestry from hotter regions tend to fare better in heat waves but struggle more during cold snaps – and whether the reverse is true for people with cold-adapted ancestry. As a complement, the team is using ancient DNA to assess whether migration across climates in the past affected natural selection in traits related to temperature regulation and environmental adaptation.

Additional seed grants awarded in Fall 2025 include:

Better outcomes for data center neighbors

Jason Beckfield, Department of Sociology

Calculating the value of trees

Wolfram Schlenker, Harvard Kennedy School
Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Climate migration in Pakistan

Mashail Malik, Department of Government

The effects of climate change on global migration

Ishan Nath, Harvard Kennedy School

Music and Rain, an ethnographic film

Richard Wolf, Department of Music