PhDing, Data, Air Quality and Health

I was in Coventry for about a week. A mini-vacation, if I may call it that. My sister was at school during the day, which leaves me with plenty of time to wander around and play tourist. To fill some of that time, I visited the Coventry Transport Museum, and the Midland Air Museum.  This post is about cars, bikes, data, and stewardship. Because apparently I can't switch off the researcher part of my brain, even on holiday. And I kept seeing beautiful connections that tagged at my data steward wannabe heart and brain strings. I've visited a fair number of museums. There's one next to my university (Uni of Manchester) with fascinating natural history collections. Then there are museums filled with ancient artefacts, artworks, scrolls, ships, and mummies. The British Museum comes to mind. I still have complicated feelings about some of the histories behind those collections, especially when it comes to human remains. Some questions about carrying a dead body buried in respect ...

For years, conversations about air pollution in Kenya, as in many other low- and middle-income countries, often began and ended with one solution: plant more trees. It was a comforting response. Tree planting is visible, familiar and easy to rally behind. But its simplicity also reduced a complex public health crisis to a single environmental intervention. It obscured the transport systems, household energy choices, industrial emissions, waste-burning practices and institutional failures that shape the air Kenyans breathe every day. By 2023, poor air quality was estimated to contribute to approximately 23,000 deaths annually in Kenya, with household air pollution accounting for a substantial share of the burden. Yet air pollution is still too often discussed as if it were only an environmental concern. It is also a transport problem, an energy problem, a climate problem and, above all, a public health crisis. For a long time, however, that crisis remained abstract. What changed? Data. ...