Michael Jerrett

Michael Jerrett is department chair and professor of environmental health sciences in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and an expert on how the built environment affects public health from exposure to pollution to how the design of cities influences physical activity, behavior and obesity. Jerrett is an authority on how functional separation — the 20th-century American urban planning paradigm that had people living in residential suburbs and commuting to their jobs in cars — negatively affects public health by discouraging physical activity like walking and biking, leading to more obesity and also pollution.

In his work, Jerrett has also studied disparities in health outcomes among different socioeconomic classes, specifically how to understand the social distribution of exposure to air pollution among different groups (e.g., poor vs. wealthy).

Jerrett is director of the UCLA Center for Occupational Environmental Health.