Alex Nading
Cornell University, NY·Social Science
Many of the harshest effects of climate change reach people through their homes. Access to efficient energy for heating and cooling can mean the difference between life and death in vulnerable communities.
- Fields
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
- Topics
climate resilience
household energy
energy poverty
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Analyze how households in the US, Ghana, India, Singapore and the UK use energy to heat and cool their homes, using comparative qualitative methods that attend to kinship, gendered labor and local architectural practices.
- Examine how community-driven home building and repair practices, including locally sourced low-cost cooling and insulation, could save energy and build climate resilience.
- Combine qualitative findings with quantitative and spatial analysis of where housing and climate risks overlap, and assess how regional and global housing and energy markets enable or block net-zero living.
- Build a multimodal platform of texts, computer models and data sets presenting transferable best practices for household heating and cooling challenges.
More about the research
Poor and marginalized households spend a larger share of their income on energy. Yet they have also developed creative solutions, such as low-cost cooling and insulation from local materials and heat and cold action plans that use social networks to protect the most vulnerable. The central question is how housing can become a source of climate resilience rather than climate vulnerability. Answering it requires an understanding of how people actually live with energy systems, heating and cooling technologies, and their homes.
Why it matters
Low-income and marginalized households facing extreme heat and cold bear a heavy energy burden and serious health risks. Learning from the low-cost cooling, insulation and community heat-action strategies these households already use could guide scalable, community-driven housing and energy solutions. Planners, policymakers and communities in places such as Ghana, India, Singapore, the UK and the US could draw on the resulting models and data to support equitable household-level climate resilience.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Elizabeth McCormick
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Engineering
Develop accessible, immediately deployable modular masonry materials made from low-impact local resources for hot-humid, mosquito-affected rural regions of Tanzania.
Carina Gronlund
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure how indoor temperature relates to cognitive function and sleep quality and duration in older adults, using actigraphy sleep sensors, surveys and sub-hourly indoor monitoring over a year.
Di Shi
New Mexico State University, NM·Engineering
Model multi-scale climate dynamics, including flooding, drought and temperature extremes, and link them to sociodemographic energy maps of three rural communities.
The school
Cornell University: 37 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 537 research doctorates a year.
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