Ellen Considine

Research Interests

My work lies at the intersection of environmental change, health & wellbeing, and data science. “GeoHealth” and “planetary health” are distinct but related fields which seek not only to understand the impact of environmental changes on humans and vice-versa, but also to develop “solutions” or strategies for addressing environmental and public health challenges. Trained as an applied statistician, I focus on the application of innovative data science methods in this realm, with an emphasis on identifying pragmatic and just solutions. To make this more concrete, some questions my work has explored include: 

• What are the impacts of plastic waste policies (and subsequent changes in the amounts of waste and open burning of waste) on air quality? Can we use remotely sensed data paired with causal inference methods to credibly estimate this?
• When should we issue heat alerts to reduce the public health impacts of extreme heat? Can we use reinforcement learning (a type of machine learning / AI) to optimize this?
• Where [spatially] should we place low-cost air quality sensors to increase both accuracy and equity of real-time air quality reporting? Can we use Monte Carlo simulations to illustrate practical tradeoffs, such as between the spatial density of sensors and the error (noisiness) in the sensor measurements?
• To what extent do [existing] machine learning-derived air pollution datasets capture spatiotemporal variation in population exposure to wildfire smoke? 

More Info

I will be recruiting graduate students to start in Fall 2026. If you are interested in working with me, please email me your CV and an explanation of how your research background and interests may align with my work. 

Select Honors and Awards

• American Statistical Association Student Paper Competition Section on Statistical Learning & Data Science Applied Track Winner, 2024
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2020
• CU Boulder Outstanding Graduate of the College of Engineering & Applied Science, 2020 

Publications

https://ellenconsidine.github.io/publication/