Meet the 2026 Awardee: Nina M. Flores, PhD
Nina Flores', PhD research sits at the intersection of environmental justice and climate change. She received her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in 2025, where she conducted epidemiological assessments of environmental exposures such as household mold, power outages, and ambient air pollution, all of which are worsening with climate change.
Her dissertation examined the impact of the New York City Housing Authority’s 2019 mold intervention (Mold Busters) on asthma-related emergency department visits and explored climate-related threats to the intervention’s progress. She found that the intervention substantially reduced asthma-related emergency visits, a finding with strong public health and clinical relevance. She aims to build on this work by continuing to advance research focused on improving health in public housing and low-income housing more broadly.
She earned her BS in Computational Biology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020 and is now a first-year postdoctoral fellow in the Promoting Equity in Cardiovascular and Respiratory Health training program, jointly based in the UT Austin School of Social Work and Dell Medical School. She is excited to be back in her home state of Texas and to continue her work linking climate-related exposures to health outcomes. Her current projects include examining historical zoning in Austin and proximity to air pollution, pollen and COPD across seven Texas cities, and heat-related impacts on perinatal health statewide.
Description
Margaret Becklake (May 27, 1922-October 17, 2018) grew up and studied medicine in South Africa, and, after postgraduate training in London, returned to her native country to work at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Miner’s Silicosis Bureau, where she studied the effects of dust inhalation on workers in the gold mines. In 1957 she moved to Montréal where worked at McGill University in the Departments of Medicine and Epidemiology, the Montreal Chest Hospital, and the Royal Victoria Hospital. Her widely published research on occupational lung disease and both international and socioeconomic lung health disparities brought her international recognition. She received many awards including the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Thoracic Society. She started a research capacity building program that trained and nurtured young African investigators, a forerunner to the ATS MECOR Program, and she served on the MECOR faculty. Dr. Becklake was active in the EOPH assembly and was a mentor and role model to researchers and clinicians around the world.
The Margaret Becklake award will be given annually for the best EOPH abstract involving work done in low and/or middle-income countries or addressing international and/or socioeconomic health disparities. The awardee will be selected by the EOPH Program Committee Chair and Chair-Elect.