Hawai‘i Keiki Museum invites Big Island community to learn about Project HEATWAVE

Several universities and their partners are heating up the discussion about the dangers of heat waves and extreme while taking action to raise awareness and mitigate the health burden they cause.

Join Hawai‘i Keiki Museum from 5:30 to 7 p.m. today for a museum lecture series event highlighting Project HEATWAVE.

Doors open at 5 p.m., with a question-and-answer session at 6:15 p.m. and neworking opportunities with light pupus at 6:30 p.m.

There is no cost to attend. Everyone is welcome.

Project HEATWAVE (Heat Emergency Avoidance Techniques Working to Adapt to Vulnerabilities Equitably) is a collaborative, volunteer-led project to strengthen understanding of extreme heat and its effects on people’s health.

It also aims to develop tools, policies and technology to support local analysis and implementation of responses to save lives.

More than a billion people — between 1.1 and 1.7 billion — live in regions of the globe that will experience will experience life-threatening heat waves during the 21st century.

Project HEATWAVE is the first of its kind to combine advanced climate modeling, public health analysis and policy with medical and technology innovation to mitigate the public health harms of heat waves.

Seminar speakers will share lessons from the project’s first year, including building collaborations throughout several of New York University’s global campuses, Georgia Tech, Harvard, BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities) University in Bangladesh and global nonprofit SilverLining.

The project is expanding throughout low- and middle-income countries at risk of heat-related humanitarian disasters — such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Ghana — and high-income countries with extreme heat — including the United States and United Arab Emirates; particularly coastal areas, where the combination of heat and humidity subverts the human body’s ability to cool off.

Anna Bershteyn is director of Project HEATWAVE and an associate professor in the Department of Population health at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. She will be the main speaker during tonight’s seminar.

Bershteyn’s research focuses on forecasting climate change and pandemics as well as comparing policy options using mathematical modeling.

She has a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) vaccine discovery and previously led the HIV and tuberculosis modeling effort at the Institute for Disease Modeling, which is now part of the Gates Foundation.

Hawai‘i Keiki Museum is located at 69-250 Waikōloa Beach Drive in Waikōloa. Contact the museum at 808-315-8862 with any questions or to get additional information.