Asthma is the most common illness of childhood and a leading cause of childhood morbidity, responsible for an estimated 1.8 million emergency department (ED) visits nationally each year. Working class communities and people of color, who disproportionately live in areas with increased environmental exposures, such as bad air quality, have not only a higher incidence of asthma, but also more severe illness and complications, with a myriad of downstream effects on quality of life. To understand and work towards preventing these exposures, Dr. Adam Haber, who is Assistant Professor of Computational Biology and Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, applies machine learning and data science to pursue two interacting research directions. First, the Haber lab aims to define the cellular mechanisms of environmentally mediated airway inflammation – that is, what happens inside the lungs when someone breathes in an allergen or a toxin. They approach this by developing new ways to analyze emerging high-dimensional profiling methods, particularly single-cell and spatial multi-omics, to detect new types of lung cells and how they interact during inflammatory conditions. For example, Dr. Haber’s group previously discovered a new type of lung cell called the pulmonary ionocyte, which they showed is key to regulating the immune defenses of the airways against inhaled toxins and allergens. The second direction applies machine learning to population health data to determine, at high spatial resolution, where the exposures that cause and exacerbate asthma are happening. In these projects, Dr. Haber’s group uses geospatial data analysis to identify where dangerous housing conditions are affecting people’s respiratory health – they recently showed that allergens associated with poor quality housing, particularly mice, mold, and roaches, are strongly disparate across Boston, and are contributing to the markedly higher rates of asthma emergency department visits among children and adults from Boston’s working class communities of color. Dr. Haber’s group also recently showed that very high rates of asthma attacks at a housing complex is a warning sign, a ‘canary in the coal mine’, that can be used to accurately identify the presence of dangerous indoor exposures that are otherwise hard to detect across the city in a scalable manner. Together these research directions enable the Haber lab to work towards improving the quality of available diagnostics and treatment and eliminating disparities in the exposures that drive asthma.