Austin and Weaver have co-authored a manuscript published in The North Carolina Journal of Mathematics and Statistics that describes Austin's Lumen research.
Sarah Austin, ’22, an Honors Fellow and 2020 recipient of Elon’s prestigious Lumen Prize, and Assistant Professor of Statistics Mark Weaver have co-authored a manuscript that has recently appeared in The North Carolina Journal of Mathematics and Statistics. The journal is published out of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
In their article, “Association between Fire-Related Particulate Matter Exposure and Childhood Asthma in Peru: A Burden of Disease Assessment,” Austin and Weaver applied a novel epidemiological approach to explore the association between particulate matter resulting from increased fires in the Peruvian Amazon and incidence of asthma among children living in the region. This modeling approach combines geospatial raster data, which are data laid out in a uniform grid over an entire region or country, with data from other sources, including meta analyses and burden of disease models. The results of the burden of disease assessment suggest that increased fires in recent years have led to up to 15,000 additional asthma cases among Peruvian children.
Austin previously presented her research in spring 2022 at both the National Conference on Undergraduate Research and Elon’s SURF day. She is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Analytics at North Carolina State University.