Ellen Considine Joining the Department of Geography and CIRES
In August 2025,ÌýEllen Considine started as an Assistant Professor of Geography and a Fellow of CIRES (the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences). She is also a faculty affiliate of the new Public Health program at CU Boulder.
Ellen’s research focuses on the application of innovative data science methods to address environmental health challenges, both to evaluate the status quo and to design data-driven monitoring and intervention strategies to promote public health and equity. Recent examples of her work include investigating the air quality impacts of nation-level plastic waste policies (via the mechanism of open burning) using a combination of remotely sensed data and causal inference methods, and developing a framework with which reinforcement learning (a branch of AI) can be used to optimize issuance of heat alerts for public health.
She received her PhD in Biostatistics from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Previously, as an undergraduate at CU Boulder (BS in applied math, minors in geography and economics),ÌýEllenÌýworked in Earth Lab, mentored by Colleen Reid. In October 2025, EllenÌýwas welcomed back to Earth Lab and gave a research talk –Ìý.
In both Fall 2025 and Spring 2026, Ellen is teaching GEOG 3023: Statistics & Geographic Data.
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