Dr. Habre is a NEXUS MPI and an Associate Professor of Environmental Health and Spatial Sciences at USC, with joint appointments in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute. In NEXUS, in addition to her role as MPI, Dr. Habre leads the NEXUS Geospatial Hub in collaboration with Arcot Rajasekar, PhD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Geospatial Hub aims to pioneer innovative methods to examine how social and environmental factors influence health by developing a scalable geospatial data framework that enables researchers and public health officials to connect place-based exposures in the external environment with health outcomes at both the population and individual levels.
In addition, Dr. Habre leads the Exposure Sciences Research Program in the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center and the CLIMA Climate-Related Exposures, Adaptation, and Health Equity Center at USC. Her lab’s research focuses on advancing precision environmental health by developing state-of-the-art exposure science (or “exposomics”) methods and understanding the health effects of co-exposure to complex air pollution mixtures and social stressors across the life course.
Currently, Dr. Habre is focused on investigating residual smoke and ash related chemical exposures and acute and longer term health impacts of the recent California wildfires in Los Angeles. She was recently interviewed by Science Friday to discuss “ The Toxic Aftermath of an Urban Fire”, and by the Washington Post for an article titled “ Here Are the Toxic Threats That Emerge After an Urban Wildfire” She is collaborating with Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and multiple institutions in the LA Fire Health Consortium and in Los Angeles to launch community air monitoring and health studies and provide critically needed data to impacted communities.
Recently, Dr. Habre visited Ahmedabad, India as a guest at CliCON OEH2025 where she discussed geospatial and measurement approaches to assessing climate-related exposures and vulnerability factors, especially the use of geospatial data, remote sensing data, machine learning models, and personal monitoring.
Fun Fact: During Dr. Habre’s trip to India as a guest at CliCON OEH2025,she visited Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram and the Adalaj stepwell in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Dr. Habre comments that “Gandhi’s wheel of life was a brilliant reminder of how when we talk about environmental and social determinants of health - the basic tenets of health, community, and dignity unite us all - within very beautiful and critically important local cultures and contexts. The stepwell is a mind-blowing, intricate work of art centered around water as a source of life. There is no clearer example of how water and ecosystem health = human health and vice versa.”
