APARC is pleased to share that Stanford alumnae Shiran Victoria Shen and Lizhi Liu have won prestigious awards for best dissertation in their fields. Both Shen and Liu earned their doctoral degrees in Political Science in 2018 and worked with Jean Oi, director of the China Program at APARC, during their tenure as doctoral students.

Shen, who is currently an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, has won the 2020 Harold D. Lasswell Award for her dissertation The Political Pollution Cycle: An Inconvenient Truth and How To Break It. The award is given annually by the American Political Science Association for “the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public policy.” Using a wide array of data, techniques, and research designs, Shen’s work explains how environmental change influences and is shaped by politics and policy. It centers on the critical case of air pollution control policies and uses China as a natural experiment.

Liu, whose doctoral research focuses on the political economy of e-commerce in China, has won the 2020 Ronald H. Coase Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics. Her study proposes that China has devised a novel solution, that is, institutional outsourcing, to the central question of how developing states build market-supporting institutions. She is currently an assistant professor in the McDonough School of Business and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government at Georgetown University.

Congratulations, Shiran and Lizhi, on your excellent work and prestigious awards!

Dust sweeping across the Southeast U.S. in recent days warns of a growing risk to infants and children in many parts of the world. A Stanford-led study focuses on this dust, which travels thousands of miles from the Sahara Desert, to paint a clearer picture than ever before of air pollution’s impact on infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper, published on June 29 in Nature Sustainability, reveals how a changing climate might intensify or mitigate the problem, and points to seemingly exotic solutions to reducing dust pollution that could be more effective and affordable than current health interventions in improving child health.

“Africa and other developing regions have made remarkable strides overall in improving child health in recent decades, but key negative outcomes such as infant mortality remain stubbornly high in some places,” said study senior author Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “We wanted to understand why that was, and whether there was a connection to air pollution, a known cause of poor health.”

Understanding airborne danger

Children under 5 are particularly vulnerable to the tiny particles, or particulate, in air pollution that can have a range of negative health impacts, including lower birth weight and impaired growth in the first year of life. In developing regions, exposure to high levels of air pollution during childhood is estimated to reduce overall life expectancy by 4-5 years on average.

Quantifying the health impacts of air pollution – a crucial step for understanding global health burdens and evaluating policy choices – has been a challenge in the past. Researchers have struggled to adequately separate out the health effects of air pollution from the health effects of activities that generate the pollution. For example, a booming economy can produce air pollution but also spur developments, such as lower unemployment, that lead to better healthcare access and improved health outcomes.

To isolate the effects of air pollution exposure, the Stanford-led study focuses on dust carried thousands of miles from the Bodélé Depression in Chad – the largest source of dust emissions in the world. This dust is a frequent presence in West Africa and, to a lesser extent, across other African regions. The researchers analyzed 15 years of household surveys from 30 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa covering nearly 1 million births. Combining birth data with satellite-detected changes in particulate levels driven by the Bodélé dust provided an increasingly clear picture of poor air quality’s health impacts on children.

Sobering findings and surprising solutions

The researchers found that a roughly 25 percent increase in local annual mean particulate concentrations in West Africa causes an 18 percent increase in infant mortality. The results expand on a 2018 paper by the same researchers that found exposure to high particulate matter concentrations in sub-Saharan Africa accounted for about 400,000 infant deaths in 2015 alone.

The new study, combined with previous findings from other regions, makes clear that air pollution, even from natural sources, is a “critical determining factor for child health around the world,” the researchers write. Emissions from natural sources could change dramatically in a changing climate, but it’s unclear how. For example, the concentration of dust particulate matter across Sub-Saharan Africa is highly dependent on the amount of rainfall in the Bodélé Depression. Because future changes in rainfall over the Bodélé region due to climate change are highly uncertain, the researchers calculated a range of possibilities for sub-Saharan Africa that could result in anywhere from a 13-percent decline in infant mortality to a 12-percent increase just due to changes in rainfall over the desert. These impacts would be larger than any other published projections for climate change impact on health across Africa.

Safeguarding children against air pollution is nearly impossible in many developing regions because many homes have open windows or permeable roofs and walls, and infants and young children are unlikely to wear masks. Instead, the researchers suggest exploring the possibility of dampening sand with groundwater in the Bodélé region to stop it from going airborne – an approach that has been successful at a small scale in California.

The researchers estimate that deploying solar-powered irrigation systems in the desert area could avert 37,000 infant deaths per year in West Africa at a cost of $24 per life, making it competitive with many leading health interventions currently in use, including a range of vaccines and water and sanitation projects.

“Standard policy instruments can’t be counted on to reduce all forms of air pollution,” said study lead author Sam Heft-Neal, a research scholar at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment. “While our calculation doesn’t consider logistical constraints to project deployment, it highlights the possibility of a solution that targets natural pollution sources and yields enormous benefits at a modest cost.”

Additional co-authors include Eran Bendavid, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford, member of the Maternal andChild Health Research Institute and an affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; Jennifer Burney and Kara Voss of the University of California San Diego. Burke is also deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment; and a fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) condemns the systemic nature and brutal expression of racism in the United States, and we stand in full support of protestors and civil rights organizations in their calls for social justice, equal access to basic rights, and accountability. Beyond reaffirming our commitment to these values, we recognize the imperative to do better as an institution and the urgent need to take concrete action to build a more inclusive community here at our Stanford home. We have joined our colleagues at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in developing specific steps towards that goal. But we also want to take initial, immediate action in moving from protest to progress.

That’s why we are announcing today a new diversity grant to support Stanford students from underrepresented minorities with an interest in studying issues related to contemporary Asia. The field of Asian studies suffers from an extreme paucity of students, scholars, and experts who self-identify as Black/African American or as affiliated with other underrepresented minority groups. “The path towards a more diverse and inclusive field isn’t easy or straightforward, but we must get on it,” says APARC Director and FSI Senior Fellow Gi-Wook Shin. “We believe that we can tackle the existing disparity if relevant stakeholders across institutes of higher learning all work together. APARC is looking to start this change at Stanford.”

Lowering Barriers to Diversity in Asian Studies

The purpose of the APARC Diversity Grant is to encourage Stanford students from underrepresented minorities (URM) to engage in study and research of topics related to contemporary Asia and U.S.-Asia relations, including economic, health, foreign policy, social, political, and security issues. We follow the University’s definition of the URM category as encompassing “all U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have self-identified as American Indian/Alaska Native, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander.” This grant opportunity is open to current Stanford undergraduate and graduate students in the URM category from any major or discipline. “This is just a small step to start lowering disciplinary, cultural, and funding barriers that hinder broader student participation in Asian studies,” notes Shin.

APARC will award a maximum of $10,000 per grant to support a wide range of research expenses such as travel to/from research sites, academic conferences, and workshops (dependent on COVID-19 restrictions); conference registration fees; professional development training programs; purchase of physical and digital books or other required materials; and access to relevant online resources. APARC will review grant applications for projects taking place in winter/spring 2021 on a rolling basis starting on September 1, 2020. Reviews of the second round of applications, for projects taking place in summer/fall 2021, will begin on April 1, 2021.

Examples of research topics, in addition to those that Asia scholars typically study, could include China’s growing activities in Africa; understanding the evolving relations between Asian Americans and African Americans in the United States; and comparative examinations of issues such as the treatment of minorities in Asia and the United States or policies that promote anti-discriminatory practices in schools, the workplace, and other settings in Asian countries and the United States.

Application Guidelines

• Complete the application form and submit it along with these three (3) attachments:
  • A statement (no more than three pages) describing the proposed research activity or project;
  • A current CV;
  • An itemized budget request explaining research expense needs.
• Arrange for a letter of recommendation from a faculty to be sent directly to APARC. Please note: the faculty members should email their letters directly to Kristen Lee at kllee@stanford.edu.

We will consider only applications that include all supporting documents.

The ocean could produce up to 75 percent more seafood than it does today and drive sustainable economic growth, holding a key role in solving global hunger. Center on Ocean Solutions Co-Director Jim Leape joined Stanford Earth Professor Roz Naylor for a conversation about food security, the current COVID-19 pandemic and how global food policies can better integrate “blue foods” from marine and freshwater systems. 

"COVID-19 is disrupting processed and widely traded seafood products, such as salmon, shrimp and tuna," states Naylor. "However, locally produced and consumed food systems are actually faring much better. This is especially true for some small-scale fisheries, where local fishing groups have taken the initiative to sell seafood locally and new markets are emerging during the COVID-19 period. Production and consumption have become more tightly connected as a result."

Both Leape and Naylor are part of the global Blue Food Assessment, the first comprehensive review of aquatic foods and their roles in the global food system. Naylor will discuss the assessment with collaborators during the Virtual Ocean Dialogues on June 3rd. 

The pair also highlighted promising innovations for sustainable future food systems. "Illegal fishing defeats efforts to manage the resource sustainability and cheats the fishers who are playing by the rules," Leape explains. "And we can end it. Emerging technologies are bringing much greater transparency into the fishing industry."

"If we want healthy oceans in the future, we have to be thinking about a wide range of innovations, and the institutions, financial incentives, and public trust needed to turn these innovations into real market solutions," says Naylor. 

Read the full Stanford ReportQ&A >

Explore the new Blue Food Assessment website >

Learn more about our work curbing illegal fishing >