Agent based Modelling for Urban Health Impact Assessment - Tabea Sonnenschein

On Friday 11 May 2023 , Tabea Sonnenschein of the University of Utrecht presented an MRC Epidemiology Unit seminar on:
Agent based Modelling for Urban Health Impact Assessment
About this talk
Implementing interventions that tackle the Exposome in complex urban systems can be costly and have long-term, sometimes unforeseen, impacts. Hence, it is crucial to assess the health and social impacts of possible urban exposome interventions before implementing them. Spatial agent-based modelling can capture complex behaviour-environment interactions, exposure dynamics, and social outcomes in a spatial context. We present our work on agent-based modeling of transport interventions in Amsterdam.
Our agent-based modeling approach entails the integration of behavioural models of people’s mobility choices and dynamic physical models of environmental stressors (NO2, Noise). The interaction of these sub-models approximates personal behavioural and environmental exposure. Consequently, the accumulated health impacts for various interventions and population groups are assessed using exposure-response functions. We present our model architecture and methodology, the strength and limitations of ABM for health impact assessment, and our findings on the effects of transport interventions in Amsterdam.
About Tabea Sonnenschein
Tabea Sonnenschein is a PhD Candidate focused on developing spatial agent-based models that simulate the health and social impacts of urban interventions as part of the EU-funded EXPANSE and EXPOSOME-NL projects. She is affiliated to the Institute of Risk Assessment Sciences and the Geoscience Faculty at Utrecht University, as well as the Planetary Health Group of the University Medical Center Utrecht. She is moreover a junior researcher at the Center for Complex System Sciences and an expert for the Urban AI think tank. From 2019-2020, Tabea was a visiting student at the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab. In 2020 she earned her Msc Research in Urban and Economic Geography from Utrecht University (summa cum laude).