Stockholm university
SUBIC - Stockholm University Brain Imaging Centre

Seminar: The effect of wildfire smoke exposure on adolescent development

Seminar

Date: Thursday 6 November 2025

Time: 09.00 – 10.00

Location: SUBIC seminar room

Speaker: Nicholas Judd, Researcher, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University.

We are pleased to welcome Nicholas Judd to SUBIC for an upcoming seminar.

Nicholas is a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at SCAS and Principal Investigator at the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University. He is also an Affiliated Researcher at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior and Radboud University Medical Center.

His research focuses on how environmental factors—such as education, pollution, and socioeconomic conditions—shape brain and cognitive development in children. Through interdisciplinary approaches that combine psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and economics, Nicholas aims to uncover the causal mechanisms behind developmental disparities and inform policy for more equitable outcomes.

Nicholas is a recipient of both the Jacobs Foundation Fellowship (2025–2027) and the eScience Fellowship (2024–2025), recognizing his contributions to childhood development and open science. His work includes natural experiments, fundamental cognitive research, and open-source tools for the research community.

We look forward to an engaging seminar and discussion with Nicholas on his impactful and timely research.

 

Abstract

A major public health concern is the adverse effects of air pollution. Fundamental research suggests a mechanistic link between greater pollution (e.g., PM2.5) and adverse health effects. However, most population-level research has used neighborhood pollution indicators. These are problematic, as they are heavily confounded with a myriad of other socioeconomic and individual-level characteristics - making it is near impossible to isolate pollutions causal impact. Here, we leverage a unique source of air pollution to better estimate the true impact of air pollution: Wildfires. 

We construct wildfire smoke exposure measures (cumulative perinatal and childhood) for 9806 children in the Adolescent Brain Development Consortium (ABCD). Using confirmatory factor analysis we make a measure of cognitive performance from 4 tasks across four waves of ABCD (ages 10, 12, 14, 16). For our structural neural measures, we test both global (mean cortical thickness and total surface area) and regional areas defined by the Desikan-Killiany cortical atlas.

Crucially, our aim is to determine how prior smoke exposure impacts developmental *trajectories* (i.e., slopes) therefore we use linear mixed effects modeling with a random slope for age and a random intercept for child. Childhood smoke exposure showed broad effects on cognitive and neural developmental trajectories. These effects survive a series of robustness tests, yet we find no effect from perinatal exposure. Our results signify a step towards separating air pollution from socioeconomic factors.
 

Theme
Brain Research - Theme page Children and Young People - Theme page Health and Living Conditions - Theme page Atmosphere and Weather - Theme page

Last updated: October 29, 2025

Source: SUBIC

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