Postdoctoral associate Pak Hung Lam recently co-authored a paper in JAMA Open Network, “Long-Term Exposure to Fine Particulate Matter and Academic Performance Among Children in North Carolina.” Dr. Lam’s research, which analyzed a robust dataset of more than 2.8 million students in North Carolina from 2001-2018, highlights the negative effects of such environmental exposure on children’s academic performance.
In their introduction, Lam and colleagues (2023) write:
Elevated exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) has been consistently associated with adverse outcomes on children’s test scores.1 However, previous research has often relied on relatively small or less representative samples and faced challenges in accounting for unobserved confounders at the individual level.2 In this cross-sectional study, we aimed to address these limitations by employing a 2-way fixed-effects model with a large administrative data set in North Carolina.
