INTERACTIVES
I went to the Amazon rainforest as part of this international reporting project on the valuable services that trees provide to humanity and the global climate.
Using a climate projection dataset from NASA, we mapped out how much cities in the US are projected to warm up by the middle of the century. Users can enter their city and get a custom forecast.
Video
I helped edit the script for this episode of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained.
This is a short video project from grad school that I shot and edited myself.
Carlton Arms Hotel from Umair Irfan on Vimeo.
Academic Research
I studied magazine writing at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I wrote my thesis on the asthma epidemic in New York City. Three neighborhoods in the United States account for 20 percent of asthma fatalities annually: Harlem and the South Bronx in New York and the Southside of Chicago.
Speaking with researchers, public health officials, doctors, patients and community advocates, I walked through the variables that made this often manageable disease so deadly.
As an undergraduate studying biochemistry at the University of Illinois, I worked on a team to design a cheap biosensor. The device uses a laser to measure protein-protein interactions. We published our findings here in 2008.
The advantage of a device like this is that it can detect very tiny concentrations of a biomolecule, allowing for early-stage disease detection and the like. Previous versions of this design relied on expensive, finicky materials, but in this study we demonstrated a device that works using cheap, durable plastic.
I also worked on a project to build nanometer-scale scaffolds to culture cartilage. We made the scaffolds from chitosan, a biodegradable polymer. Using tiny fibers of this material, cartilage cells can arrange themselves to form tissues that better replicate those in the body, paving the way for growing tissues in the lab for therapeutic purposes.