In this episode of Frontiers in Health and Happiness, Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, pediatrician and Chief Science Officer at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, explores how environmental factors like extreme heat, air pollution, and climate change uniquely impact young children's physical, mental, and social development. With real-world examples and compelling research, she discusses how science can inform policy and drive meaningful change—from designing child-friendly cooling centers to supporting caregivers and communities in building resilience. Dr. Burghardt also shares practical tips for families and a heartfelt message about the power of unconditional love in early childhood. Whether you're a parent, policymaker, or early childhood professional, this episode offers eye-opening insights and actionable ideas for creating healthier environments where all children can thrive.
Ayla Fudala: Hello and welcome to Frontiers in Health and Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My name is Ayla Fudala, Center Communications coordinator, and I'll be asking experts how to live a healthy, happy life.
Thank you for joining us for the fourth episode in our Environments for Health and Happiness series. In this episode, we'll discuss how what surrounds us shapes us, the crucial role developmental environments can play in lifelong health and happiness, and what can be done to improve those outcomes for future generations.
Today, I'll be speaking with early childhood development expert and Harvard Chan School alum Dr. Lindsey Burghardt. In addition to her role as a practicing pediatrician, Dr. Burghardt serves as the Chief Science Officer at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. She is also the founding director of the Center’s Early Childhood Scientific Council for equity in the environment, a multidisciplinary group dedicated to translating the science on how the built and natural environments affect children's development and lifelong health. Dr. Burghardt has made it her mission to share this vital information with the world, ensuring it is both accessible and actionable for anyone looking to make a positive impact.
So, Dr. Burghardt, you serve as Chief Science Officer at the Center on the Developing Child. Can you tell me a little about the center and your work there?
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Sure. Thanks for having me today. So the Center on the Developing Child is based at Harvard University. We sit in between the Graduate School of Education and the School of Public Health, and we're a group of around 30 really dedicated people whose aim is really to use what science tells us in service of making things better for young children, especially those facing really significant adversity. And so what we try to do is see what the scientific body of knowledge has to say, and then connect that knowledge to decision makers who sit across a range of sectors, all of whose work affects the health and well-being of young children. And that's a really wide range of sectors, whether it's in policy or in programs or in services. But we believe that really everybody's work has the ability to make things better for young kids, and we just hope that we can connect the dots about what we know and what we can do.
Ayla Fudala: Can you give me a quick example of one of your programs there?
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Sure. So, you know, our work is done in large part through a science synthesis process that is run through a number of scientific councils. And one of those councils is a multidisciplinary group of people called the Early Childhood Scientific Council on Equity and the Environment. And there's expertise in social anthropology, in social and contextualizing factors on health and pediatrics and environmental health. And we all came together a few years back and talked about what the scientific literature had to say about how extreme heat affects young children. And at the time, we were just starting to kind of experience and feel, all of us, as caregivers, as parents, as scientists that, you know, things were getting warmer and that it was affecting kids. My own children's school was closing early, and kids in Boston were missing school because of hot days in September, which was really unusual.
And we saw that there were some conversations happening around heat in the news. People were talking about how elderly people were affected. And we were hearing about people going to the emergency room with heat stroke ,and noticing that there was an opportunity to add kids into that conversation. That while these, you know, things were happening around, what do we need to do about rising temperatures? Kids weren't necessarily as big a part of that conversation as we thought they should be.
And so we dug through the scientific literature and kind of brought together, you know, what all these amazing researchers from all over the world had done to help us understand, in our biology, how heat affects young kids. And so we brought these papers together into a working paper that really aimed to be accessible and readable to people across a range of sectors. And then we went out and engaged with policymakers.
There's a terrific, really active group in the city of Boston and their Office of Early Childhood who are thinking about what we learned from this synthesis process? How do we use now what we're all kind of raising up more in the discussions about kids to include them? I think Boston is a really great example of a city that started to really intentionally think about kids in their heat emergency planning, and thinking about where do people with young children go if it's really hot?
And we're including caregivers in that conversation to learn from them about all these hot days, how do they experience heat? And there's a terrific number of teams across the Center on the Developing Child, beyond the science team, from the communications team to our partnerships and engagement team, who all work together to make these conversations happen. And we've, I think, felt really proud to be a part of the process and to see in Boston, in particular, how this kind of scientific knowledge and bringing together people in a room over a shared goal can help make things better for kids.
Ayla Fudala: Are there any programs happening in Boston as a result of this?
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Yeah. So, you know, Boston is thinking across a number of spaces, and I probably will defer to them about how much they're ready to share, about how much is still in the works. But I think that what I've seen is that they're thinking really intentionally with their heat planning. Boston has a heat website where you can go and learn about resources within the city for what to do during heat emergencies. And that includes really dedicated resources for families taking care of young kids. And so I think that they are really thinking quite intentionally about it, which is really exciting.
Ayla Fudala: So how does excessive heat impact children's social, mental and physical health?
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, I think we can all feel that temperatures are increasing. You know, if you've been around the last few summers and in the fall, you can feel that all around the world things are warmer than they used to be. And that's true in places that are typically really hot already, so places in the South. But it's also true in places like Boston that are usually very cool and dry. And so when we talk about extreme heat, we're really talking about temperatures that are much higher than normal for a given location. And so that change in what you're experiencing is really important. So an 85 degree temperature day in September in Boston is going to feel very different to a child who's not accustomed to that versus a child who maybe lives in Miami, who experiences those high days, hot days, more often.
But for all of us, there's a limit to our tolerance. And, you know, extreme heat affects every cell and organ in our bodies. This is true for children, especially fetuses, infants, and very young children. So the first few years of life, they're especially sensitive to heat because their systems are developing really rapidly. Their brains are still forming, their respiratory systems are still forming, their immune systems are still forming. They're very sensitive to exposures from their environment. And so extreme heat has effects on prenatal development, with an increased risk of some types of birth defects, particularly when there's high temperatures experienced in the first trimester. And then also, high temperatures experienced during all parts of pregnancy can carry a heightened risk of babies being born prematurely, which we think about as being a birth before about 38 weeks, 37 weeks or so gestation. And that's important because being born too early carries a heightened risk of dying in the newborn period or of being readmitted to the hospital. But it also carries a heightened risk of a range of negative health outcomes across your lifespan. So problems with learning or in your metabolic health. And so these things, even though they're happening in the perinatal period, meaning around the time you're born, they can have consequences for your development much later in life. And then across childhood and even into adolescence.
Extreme heat has really important effects on sleep. So actually, one of the most important things that happens when we fall asleep is that our core temperature drops and that lets us fall asleep. But if it's too hot in the room where you're sleeping, especially if you don't have access to air conditioning or cooling-- and think about little babies who sometimes are swaddled and dependent on adults to move them into a cool space--it can really cause significant sleep disruptions. And if you've ever been awake all night with an infant who can't sleep, you know that that affects your well-being the next day because you haven't slept either. And that's very true for a toddler as well. And for all of us, chronic and repeated sleep deprivation or disruptions have really important implications for a variety of health outcomes across our life.
And then there's also really important effects of heat on learning and on behavior and mental health for children. And with learning, classroom temperature really dramatically affects children's ability to learn, not only on the days that it's hot, but actually even persisting in the years beyond that. And then with mental and behavioral health for children, there's this sort of combination of behavioral factors and biological factors that come into play, where extreme heat actually destabilizes the neurotransmitters in our brain that help us to stabilize our mood. But then also people can just sort of feel, you know, more irritable, less able to calm yourself if you're in a hot room. And if you imagine being a preschool teacher or a kindergarten teacher in a room with 25 toddlers, there's a big difference in their behavior. If that room is 88 degrees on a September day, or if it's a calm, pleasant 68, you know it's really going to affect how those toddlers behave. But also, our ability as caregivers, you know, to maintain the type of attitude we want to be able to show to care for young children.
And then there's a whole other category we could get into about asthma and risks of other health related conditions. But I think those big categories are really important, both because they can affect children's health in the moment but also throughout their lifetime. If your learning is affected repeatedly because your classroom is hot year after year for the first two to 2 to 3 months of the school year, that's really important, and those effects can add up.
Ayla Fudala: So we talked about climate change and heat. How about pollution? How is that impacting children's mental, social and physical health? And just a note, by social health I mean social connectedness and sense of belonging within their community.
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Yeah, I love that question. And I think air quality is another area where we can really raise awareness and understanding of how important this is within a developmental environment in shaping kids’ well-being. We've known for many years that poor air quality has negative effects on children's health, whether it's their respiratory health or their mental health. And we've seen really exciting studies showing that transitions from diesel school buses to electric school buses, even if it's just a short ride to school, 20 minutes or so, can decrease rates of asthma in those children by 30%, and it actually has beneficial effects for the bus drivers as well. So even that short window of eliminating exposure to that pollution from the bus has really profound health effects.
And so, you know, that evidence is increasing and we're seeing more and more how important air quality is for health. And we think of air quality as being an outdoor issue for young children. But actually, the pollution that's outdoors can very much get indoors. And for all of us, we actually spend quite a bit of our time, you know, if not close to 90% of our lives, indoors. And depending how leaky the buildings are that we're in, how tightly the windows are sealed, as much as half of what's outside can get inside and stay there and affect children's development.
So while we often think of these sources of pollution as being outside, they actually very much can come inside in the places where children are sleeping in their bedrooms and in their schools, where they're spending quite a bit of time. And, you know, we had this area of research about outdoor air pollution that's well understood.
And then there's a growing understanding and really exciting understanding that's emerging about the health effects of wildfires on children, which I think are another important source of pollution, because we think of them happening in faraway places, but they can actually affect the health of children in terms of an air pollution exposure for hundreds of miles from the source. And although, you know, we're outside of the community in Boston, recently, there were wildfires in the Blue Hills just a few miles from us. And so I think it's an issue that increasingly may affect more and more of us. And wildfire smoke has a negative a range of negative health effects on young children, increased rates of babies being born preterm, and there's more evidence about even single exposure to wildfire smoke, and over a four and five day period, leading to more children under the age of five wheezing or having trouble with their asthma. And really important effects on children's mental health. So children who experience having to evacuate from their home, even though that's not a direct source of the pollution, they're evacuating from the pollution and from the source of their danger, or having to leave a pet, that has really profound effects on their mental health, too.
And it really gets to your question when it comes to an air quality standpoint, about the importance of social connectedness, and how disruptive that can be if you have to leave your home or repeatedly move from place to place. And what that instability does, you know, cascading over your lifetime, of not being able to go to school or not having consistent access to doctor's visits for vaccines, and then in turn, being more susceptible to vaccine-preventable diseases.
Ayla Fudala: Thank you. Yeah. In the second episode of this podcast series, I interviewed Dr. Joe Allen and I learned a lot about the importance of indoor air quality from him, which was very illuminating for me because it wasn't something I'd ever heard about before.
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: I've learned so much from Joe, and I hope that he referred everybody to his Healthy Buildings website, but it's an amazing place if you're interested in learning more about that. And I think the most eye-opening thing for me about the indoor air quality discussion is really how much of what's outside gets in, but then also how much of these invisible sources of indoor air quality pollution happen inside that we don't think about. And so thinking about what's in the air. Children are children. Breathing when they're indoors is really important. Everything from you know, what are we cleaning our houses with and our schools, you know, all the way down the line. And I think it's a real opportunity where we can lean in and say, how can we kind of turn things off at the source, which is, you know, a thing that Joe is very good at describing.
Ayla Fudala: From your experience as a practicing pediatrician, what have been some of the most pressing environmental influences you've seen affecting the well-being and development of your patients?
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Oh my goodness, where to start? When you think about environment, if you wanted to find that really broadly, you know, think about like a developmental environment. When we think about that for children, we're really talking about and you did a really great job. I thought of like describing each sort of layer of this earlier. Like at the core, it's children's social environments, right. Like what's happening with their caregivers, what's happening in that environment of the adults that they interact with in their day to day, but then also what's in the built in natural environment and then what are kind of these larger systemic factors that we're talking about that are modifying other in these other environments? So how is climate change affecting you depending on where you live?
And I think actually really zooming in and thinking about that social environment, I think that comes up for my patients, regardless of where they live, their socioeconomic status. I think that many caregivers feel in that environment an increasing sense of wanting more support from broader community and understanding, like, how do we do all the things that we're expected to do as caregivers in the environment that we live in? Because I think that there's a lot put on the shoulders of people taking care of young children. And I think that they're eager to look for sources of support. And it's not always obvious, I think, how to get those. And it's a when we think about what builds resilience in young children, it really starts with the resilience of their primary caregivers. And so I think when we think about taking care of young kids, we really need to broaden that, to think about how do we take care of the people who are taking care of them. And that's something that I think I feel from people across the board.
Ayla Fudala: How do these factors, like extreme heat and poor air quality, intersect with health equity in childhood health and development?
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, the way that you experience heat or air quality is in large part influenced by the environment that surrounds you. So if we look at neighborhoods that were previously redlined, where children who are a lower income or children of color are more likely to live, those those neighborhoods on average, are much hotter than neighborhoods that were not affected by discriminatory zoning practices. And so the prevalence of green space in your neighborhood, or your ability to seek out community infrastructure like community pools or, you know, pool access to a library or a high quality health care if your asthma flares up. Those are all affected by where children live. And the Childhood Opportunity Index is one way that researchers are getting a lot more precise about quantifying how children experience these different influences, whether it's heat or air quality in developmental environments. The diversity data, I believe, is still there. A website you can go there and look at. They take a look at a range of different factors that give aggregate measures, meaning when you add them all up, when you look at the sum of all these influences in a kid's neighborhood, whether it's how many 95 plus degree days they experience, and what's the level of PM 2.5 air pollution that they experience. But also on the other side, what are the protective factors they have access to? You know, they look at, you know, how much green space is there? What's the nature score in the neighborhood? You know, is there access to high, reliable transportation to get your caregivers where you need to be so that you can make sure you have nutritious food at home? What is the balance of these things? And so what the index shows is that consistently across our country, white and Asian children have access to more opportunity in their neighborhoods than black children. Even within a similar geographic region. So if you look even within the same city, in geographic areas that are very close together, children experience things like extreme heat and air pollution and all of these factors differently, even though they're geographically quite close together. And so I think it gives an opportunity to really say, where can we target investment to really bolster protective factors for children who are experiencing heat and air quality disturbances at a much higher rate? Because any difference that we see in negative health outcomes is really due to these disparities in environmental exposures. And so it's a chance for us to step in and and protect kids by targeting resources where we need them the most.
Ayla Fudala: What can be done to mitigate negative environmental impacts on children. And what roles can different groups such as caregivers, communities and governments play?
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Yeah. Again great question. Really big question. I think, you know, there's a role for a much broader range of sectors to step in and protect kids than what we think of as traditionally early childhood fields. So we think about, you know, what can we do as caregivers? What can schools do? What can early care and education centres do? But really, there's a really broad range of policies and programs that affect kids. And so by kind of broadening the bench of who can who can contribute, I think we really increase the likelihood that we can do things better for young kids. There's three levels that we've laid out in some of our working papers. When we think about how to approach the solution space, and it's from a protect, adapt, prevent framework. So protection means what can we do today? What are the measures that we can put in place with very low you know not no but low investment or what can caregivers do in the moment when these things happen. Because as we've seen you know, they the heat events or wildfire events, they're happening with increasing frequency frequency. And so we need to be prepared.
One, I think is making sure that the alerts for these events actually reach people during pregnancy and people who are caring for young children. So whether it's alerts for extreme heat days or evacuation notices or wildfire notices. Thinking about how can we connect the people who are experiencing these events with the alerts? How do we make sure that they're reaching them, whether it's partnering with health care providers or community providers or community champions to make sure that people know when they need to take extra steps to prevent them to protect themselves. I think that's also helping provide information that communities want. The LA Wildfire Study is a great example of this. This is a consortium of ten different universities that formed within two weeks of the LA wildfire event to help to learn and understand over a ten year period how families, children, people are experiencing the effects of the wildfire, but they're also getting great input from communities about what types of information is helpful. So what do they what do families want to know when they go back to their house? Do they want to know? Do I need to wear a mask if I still smell gas? And how do we get the information that people need to them?
And I think that's part of that immediate protection step, is really making sure that we have the connection between the community and the learning that we're doing about the effects of these events. And then when we think about the adaptation phase, the middle portion of this, it's thinking about where people spending time when they're pregnant, where young infants spending time and how do we adapt our infrastructure to make sure that we're thinking about the unique developmental needs of these groups.
So I was at a convening recently over the summer where people were talking about, you know, what resources are in cooling centers and how do you make sure people know that there's cooling centers out there so that they can access them? And one city reported that they went and asked, you know, everybody in their cooling center, you know, how did you find the cooling center? Why were you here? And almost no one knew that they were at a cooling center. So they've come for other reasons. They said, oh, I came because I heard there was story time, or I came because I knew that there was a splash pad nearby and we could go here and then go to the splash pad. And so I think it's, you know, different to have a space adapted for us as adults. Right? We're happy to sit in a cool space and be in a comfortable chair. And I can imagine if I were a mother with several young children, I wouldn't want to take multiple steps of public transportation Exhortation to get to a cool room if it was empty aside from chairs. Right.
And so how do we think about these spaces being welcoming for families, being a place that people want to go and kind of protecting, like the joy and wonderfulness of childhood. Childhood shouldn't have to stop because you need to access a cooling center because there's a wildfire event. So how do we think about, you know, what we can do to make early care and education centers safe, or what we can do to make school safe so that children aren't disrupted and they can still go to these places when these events occur. You know, heat is another example. How do we adapt schools so that they don't have to close halfway through the day when it's too hot? There were also last year, you know, in a number of cities, questions about what's the temperature at which you cancel outdoor recess. That really has really important implications. If kids can't play outside, that really affects their well-being. Play as an essential element of childhood. We can't just take it away because it's hot. And so how do we adapt schools and playgrounds, whether it's cool surfaces, um, green roofs, strategic shade placement so that we can extend the cool time of these buildings. And then the final category is the prevention.
So we need to think about across sectors how we just stop the continued warming from happening. I think a huge one obviously is stopping the burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas, and also thinking about how do we increase the aspects of greenery around children. So green space is one of those benefits where across childhood there are so many different areas where being able to access nature in a consistent way that's accessible, that's close to your house, it's just incredibly beneficial across a number of domains. And so I think by thinking about how do we green playgrounds, how do we green spaces near where families are living, that's just a really profound opportunity that will benefit kids in in just so many ways.
Ayla Fudala: Thank you so much. Yes. My next question was actually going to be can exposure to natural environments such as parks and green spaces contribute positively to children's mental, social and physical health? If you have any more thoughts on that.
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Yeah. Across the board. I mean, I think it contributes to all of those. There's actually a really interesting evidence about increasing access to green space and benefits to the immune system, and then consistent access on a regular basis for, you know, even an hour, a regular period of time having really protective effects on children's mental health. And then there's, I think, a really important aspect of social connectedness to what it means to be able to go to a park or a safe green space that's near your house, and see other adults who are also taking care of young children and have young children have the ability to play with each other. You know, there's so much expected of little kids. I think they go to school, they sit still all day, they take long bus rides. They do so many things. And actually this, like most critical part of childhood, is this like free play and exploration. And how do you take risks and how do you navigate social interactions when you get into a squabble with your friend and you solve that problem without adults interfering, those things really can happen when children are outside and playing. And so it's the exposure to the green space, but it's also the chance to be risky, to climb a tree a little bit, to venture a little bit farther from your mom as you get a little bit older to find your way back to, you know, not have activities and daily routine completely scaffolded by adults. That's actually like a really important part of childhood. And that can be done indoors, certainly. But there's also, I think, just a wonderful connectedness that many children like articulate and that we see as adults watching them when they're outside. And I'm sure there's papers on this too, but it's also something that I think we can all like, feel and see as people who have experienced nature ourselves or who I've seen little kids be outside. It's just joyful and childhood should be a joyful time. You know, we talk a lot about childhood. I think being, you know, reasons to optimize childhood as sort of a means to an end. You know, we have to like, help kids here so they get less heart disease there. But there's also, like this wonderful thing that's just childhood in itself that all kids deserve to have a happy, healthy childhood. And I think that part of that very much should be the chance to dig with a stick in the dirt. You know, I think all kids should at least have the opportunity to access that if their families want it. Not everybody wants to take their child to a green space, but if they do, I think that that's something that should be a right for all kids.
Ayla Fudala: I absolutely agree with you there. I used to work in environmental education with children, basically just taking them outside to teach them about the local flora and fauna, and it was just always such a refreshing experience to see their joy and wonder.
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Yeah, and I think they notice things that we don't, you know, like I can go on a walk and, you know, think about a million things that I need to do that day and maybe admire the sky and the trees. And if I go on a walk with my young son, and I actually let him stop as often as he wants to and let him notice all the things. I don't know if you if you noticed this with the kids that you work with as well, but you see so much more. I mean, they're incredibly observant and they're so curious, and I agree, I think it's just a very joyful thing.
Ayla Fudala: So do you have any final advice for caregivers or community members wanting to provide a healthy environment to promote children's mental, social and physical health? And also, on a personal note, my sister is going to give birth to her first child in a month, and I would love to have lots of helpful advice for her on how to raise my nephew to be healthy and happy.
Dr. Lindsey Burghardt: Oh well, that's so nice. I mean, I think caregivers, communities, people that are raising young kids, they're really the experts in their kids, right? Even when your baby is a couple of hours old, no one knows that baby better than you. And so I think there's so much information that comes at us all day long. And I think if. The best advice that I would have for raising a healthy, happy baby is just to love them unconditionally. You know, I think every child needs in their life like somebody who's just crazy about them. You know, that's a you know, there's a more eloquent quote that gets at that from another time. But I think just the idea of just being completely enamored with that kid and knowing that you love them no matter what happens. I think that's actually probably like a very highly protective developmental influence. So we think you think about all these things and you can kind of make yourself a little bit crazy, right? Like, what if it's too hot? What if the air is too dirty? I can't get to the park. It's, you know, there's so much that comes at us and we need to rely on and really look to people who are in policy, in our city services to, to really help make supportive developmental environments for kids. I think as caregivers, what we can do is show up and can't remember which psychologist said this, but just get a PhD in your kid, right? Know everything about them. Be the expert in them. Like delight in like every story that they tell, even if they ramble. And it makes no sense. Just act like it's the best story that you've ever heard. And this doesn't mean that we need to have blinders on and be zoned into our kids and give them our undivided attention all the time. That's not that's not reasonable. And no working or other parent can do that. But what we can do is just show them that, you know, they are really important, that they're valued and that they matter. Not only that we love them, but that they are important to us as well. And so I think maybe tuning out some of the pressures of fixing all of these larger things and focusing on that kid in front of you and the love and the joy that comes there, especially early on, I think. Don't expect to wash your dishes. Just hold the baby and get some sleep.
Ayla Fudala: And that's a wrap on today's episode of Frontiers in Health and Happiness. A special thank you to Dr. Burghardt for sharing her incredible insights and expertise. It's clear that supporting young children means supporting their communities, their caregivers, and the environments they grow up in. From the science behind extreme heat and pollution to the simple power of unconditional love and play, this conversation really brings home just how interconnected children's development is with the world around them. If this sparks something for you, be sure to check out the Center on the Developing Child's resources on their website.
Over the course of our Environments for Health and Happiness series, we’ve had the opportunity to learn from leading voices who’ve each shown us how deeply connected our surroundings are to our physical, mental, and social well-being. We began with Dr. Gaurab Basu, who helped us understand how climate change intersects with health and equity. Then, Dr. Joe Allen walked us through how healthier buildings can improve everything from cognitive function to physical health. With Dr. Jo Ivey Boufford, we zoomed out from the building level to the city level, and learned how urban policy and sustainability can shape health outcomes and social connection. And today, Dr. Lindsey Burghardt brought it all home—literally—by highlighting how environmental conditions in early childhood shape lifelong well-being. Taken together, these conversations reinforce a powerful truth: the environments we build today directly shape our ability to live healthy, connected, and fulfilling lives tomorrow.
This is the end of our series for now, but we hope you’ll join us to discuss exciting new topics in the future. Thank you for joining us on this journey—and don’t forget, the work of building environments for health and happiness involves all of us.
This has been another episode of Frontiers in Health and Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. To learn more about upcoming events, visit our website, sign up for our mailing list, and follow us on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. New episodes will air every two weeks. Episodes can be found on the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness website and YouTube channel, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts are found. Thank you for listening.