Elizabeth McCormick
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Engineering
Malaria remains a leading cause of death in the developing world, and climate change is raising heat and other risks for rural communities. Most mosquito control relies on pesticides, chemicals or genetically modified mosquitoes.
- Fields
Engineering
Public Health & Epidemiology
Materials Science
- Topics
masonry
earthen construction
brick
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Develop accessible, immediately deployable modular masonry materials made from low-impact local resources for hot-humid, mosquito-affected rural regions of Tanzania.
- Explore how earthen masonry controls the transfer of heat, moisture and mosquitoes in rural housing, building low-cost prototypes with local materials and regional experts.
- Give U.S. architecture and engineering students community-based, interdisciplinary research and design experience in Tanzania alongside faculty in entomology and social anthropology.
More about the research
Houses themselves get little attention. Yet attempts to make homes mosquito-proof often trap heat and worsen air quality. This project asks whether the humble brick, the world's most common building material, could be redesigned to keep homes cool and comfortable and keep out disease-carrying mosquitoes.
Why it matters
Rural families in Tanzania and other hot, humid tropical regions face both rising heat and mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria. Low-cost bricks made from local materials could help them build homes that stay cooler, keep healthy airflow and reduce mosquito entry. This would add the built environment to public health and climate-resilience strategies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alex Nading
Cornell University, NY·Social Science
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.
Alun Lloyd
North Carolina State University, NC·Mathematics & Statistics
Measure how residents of Ibagué, Colombia differ in adopting mosquito-prevention behaviors around the home, such as water container management, and identify the cues that drive them, using observational and experimental social science methods.
Vanessa Rivera-Amill
Ponce Health Sciences University, PR·Public Health & Epidemiology
Strengthen surveillance and research capacity for acute febrile illnesses in Puerto Rico to improve detection of dengue, chikungunya, Zika and Oropouche, by combining clinical, community-based and laboratory data through the existing SEDSS and COPA platforms.
The school
University of North Carolina at Charlotte: 9 labs on PI Pages, $95M a year on research, 196 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.