Health Impact Assessment (HIA) refers to a diverse set of analytic and communicative practices that aim to inform and improve social decisions in order to improve the environmental, economic, and social conditions required for optimal population health.

 

About UCBHIG

The UC Berkeley Health Impact Group (UCBHIG) is a non-partisan, independent collective that emerged from a graduate seminar on HIA at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in 2006. The mission of UCBHIG is promote the field of Health Impact Assessment through advocacy, education, research, and community outreach. Based within UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, and Department of Environmental Health Sciences, UCBHIG's work focuses largely on the development of qualitative and quantitative tools for assessing the impacts associated with the built environment and landuse planning decisions in the San Francisco Bay Area.

UCBHIG has benefited from student involvement from the very beginning, inviting students to reach out to the local community by conducting real-world Health Impact Assessments for their class projects. Student analyses have formed the basis for two large integrated Health Impact Assessments in Oakland, CA: the Oak to Ninth Avenue HIA and the MacArthur BART Transit Village HIA.

UCBHIG was founded by Rajiv Bhatia, Tom Rivard, and Edmund Seto, who each contribute different skills to the Group:

Rajiv Bhatia, MD, MPH, Director of Environmental Health, San Francisco Department of Public Health is a vocal proponent for the use of HIA within landuse planning. He has considerable experience conducting HIA's using a variety of approaches within, alongside, and outside the framework of CEQA.

Tom Rivard, MS, REHS, San Francisco Department of Public Health is a noise and air quality specialist, who has considerable experience with field measurement and monitoring.

Edmund Seto, MS, PhD, UC Berkeley, School of Public Health, Department of Environmental Health Sciences is a specialist in Geographic Information Systems and Risk Assessment Modeling. He has considerable experience in developing disease risk models in international settings.

Contact

Edmund Seto seto@berkeley.edu