Frumpkin Newest Addition to Center

Frumkin Newest Addition to Center

Howard Frumkin, DrPH, MD, has joined the Center for Health & Nature as a Hagler Fellow. The Hagler Institute for Advanced Study at Texas A&M University selects its fellows from among top scholars with outstanding professional accomplishments.

He is a senior vice president with the Trust for Public Land and Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health.

Frumkin’s research investigates the positive health impacts of natural environments by comparing data from groups of people with regular nature contact with groups who don’t. His interests include public health aspects of the built environment, climate change, energy policy and nature contact. He has studied the impact of nature on veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder through hiking, the effects of urban nature on physical activity, authored studies that propose frameworks for determining how changes in urban nature can increase physical activity as well as city-planning policies that might lead to healthier and more sustainable cities.

Frumkin’s research into climate change has indicated that health professionals should cultivate hope in themselves and their patients as evidence suggests that hopeful people weather stress more successfully and live longer, even when diagnosed with serious diseases.

Frumpkin noted that in his medical training, he learned more treating disease than promoting health. During his training in environmental health, he learned more about environmental hazards than how the environment can promote health. He built his career around the health-promoting aspects of the natural environment, which offers low-cost treatment options with few side effects.