Ask Ufuoma Ovienmhada why she’s made the issue of heat health for incarcerated people a major focus of her research, and her answer is short, clear-eyed.
“Human dignity matters. That’s kind of the beginning and end of the sentence,” said Ovienmhada, who joined the University of Arizona last year as the Endowed Postdoctoral Research Associate in Climate Change and Human Resiliency, established in 2023 with a $4 million gift. She will join the faculty of the School of Geography, Development and the Environment, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, as an assistant professor in August.
Ovienmhada’s belief in that simple truth has fueled her rise as an early-career scientist, from earning a mechanical engineering degree at Stanford University before completing a master’s degree and later a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics; both graduate degrees she earned at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has spent the last several years focused on understanding the negative health effects that extreme heat has on incarcerated people, focusing on how factors such as building design and carceral policy exacerbate the effects of extreme heat in prisons.
Ovienmhada will be one of the up-and-coming researchers presenting her work as part of the National Academy of Sciences’ Frontiers of Science symposium in Irvine, California, March 3-5. Ovienmhada will present in a panel titled “Heat Stress and Human Health: Tackling the World’s Most Dangerous Hazard” alongside Robbie Parks, a frequent collaborator and epidemiologist at Columbia University.
Much of Ovienmhada’s presentation will touch on her recent research on extreme heat and incarcerated people, including a 2024 study from her time at MIT that used remote sensing to better understand air temperature in carceral landscapes. The study found that many prisons are experiencing increased extreme heat and certain characteristics of prisons make incarcerated people more susceptible to negative heat health effects.
“To make that more concrete, in the United States, 44 states currently do not have universal air conditioning in their state prison systems,” Ovienmhada said, adding that in her home state of Texas, for example, 70% of prisons lack air conditioning in the housing areas. “So, there’s this major infrastructure issue of access to AC that is compounded by a really poor health care system – and even further compounded by harmful power dynamics in some cases.”
Ladd Keith, an expert on heat governance and planning who leads the Heat Resilience Initiative at the Arizona Institute for Resilience, will introduce the heat health panel. Keith, an associate professor of planning at the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, will provide a general overview of extreme heat to preview deeper dives from Ovienmhada and Parks.
“The idea with Frontiers of Science is it brings together people at the forefront of different scientific research areas,” Keith said. “The fact that the National Academy of Sciences selected two people, out of all of the universities they could have selected from, to both be on the heat panel just speaks to our university’s strength in this area.”
The crowd in Irvine will include scientists from a range of disciplines – a valuable audience for finding more future collaborators to take the work a step further, Ovienmhada said.
“I’m looking forward to the opportunity to share about my discipline and my research, which is likely very different from what other people are doing at this symposium,” she added. “That’s where interdisciplinary work is really impactful – the merging of methods, bringing together different people’s expertise and context to make something even greater.”
