Dr. Rufus Edwards

Professor, UC Irvine Department of Environmental and Occupational Health; Joe C. Wen School of Population and Public Health

Dr. Edwards has over 20 years of experience in conducting laboratory and field based studies into human exposure to air pollution and subsequent health effects. These include populations in the industrialized world exposed to combustion byproducts from transportation, wildfires, vaping and tobacco smoke, and populations in less industrialized nations exposed to emissions from household solid fuel use for cooking and space heating. Dr Edwards was a member of the WHO Indoor Air Quality Guidelines Development Group (GDG) to establish air quality guidelines for household combustion sources and was lead convening author for the evidence chapter on emissions from household solid fuel use. Dr Edwards was also consultant to the WHO to develop the Household Energy Assessment Rapid Tool (HEART) to conduct rapid situational assessments and stakeholder mapping of a country’s readiness to address access to clean energy technologies and has worked with the WHO Urban Health Initiative to identify evidence based strategies to reduce the burden of air pollution in Accra, Ghana, and Katmandu, Nepal. Dr Edwards has served as air pollution consultant to the WHO regional office for South East Asia, UNICEF Europe and Central Asia office and country offices in Mongolia, Kosovo, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan to address effects of air pollution from rapid urbanization on children’s health. Dr Edwards also served as air pollution consultant to the Asia Development Bank and the Swiss Center for International Health.

Education:

• Ph.D. 1999 in Exposure Measurement and Assessment, Rutgers and UMDNJ, Joint Degree
• M.S. 1995 in Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University

Post-Doctoral Researcher, Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Kirk Smith.

Post-Doctoral researcher at the Finnish National Institute of Public Health, Kuopio, Finland. Analysis of Air Pollution Exposure Distributions of Adult Populations in Helsinki, as part of a European Union 4th Framework RTD Program funded multi-center study: EXPOLIS, sponsored by the Finnish National Academy of Sciences (1999-2000).