Current Lab Members

Meet the enthusiastic REACH lab team.

Mostafijur Rahman, PhD, MS

Assistant Professor

Mostafijur Rahman is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. His research focuses on leveraging large-scale environmental and healthcare datasets to develop data-driven solutions for climate and population health. Using multidisciplinary approaches in environmental epidemiology, exposure assessment, and data science, he investigates the health impacts of air pollution, extreme heat, floods, tropical cyclones, and other climate-related hazards on mental health, neurodevelopment, and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. He earned his PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from New York University School of Medicine and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Southern California. His current work applies advanced statistical modeling and machine learning to examine the spatial temporal trend of meteorological data and its relationship with health data to contribute to evidence-based policymaking and delivery of actionable public health interventions.

Research Interests: Environmental Epidemiology, Air Pollution, Climate Change and Health, Mental Health

Email: mrahman8@tulane.edu

David Luglio, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2024-)

Environmental health scientist and environmental epidemiologist whose work primary focuses on air pollution exposures and their health impact. This work includes field sampling, toxicology, and epidemiological methods. Currently, projects include understanding impacts of air pollution and heat on neurodevelopment in a cohort in California, cardiovascular and respiratory mortality and morbidity across Louisiana, and exposure assessment across neighborhoods in New Orleans.

I received my PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from New York University (2023) and a BS in Biological Sciences from Cornell University (2017).

Research Interests: Air pollution, Exposure assessment, Inhalation toxicology, Environmental epidemiology

Email: dluglio@tulane.edu

Balaji Ramesh, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2025-)

Geographer turned environmental epidemiologist whose research examines the health impacts of environmental exposures, including extreme heat, air pollution, and green space. At Tulane my work focusus on understanding the morbidity and mortality associated with extreme weather events such as floods, tropical cyclones, and heat.

PhD Epidemiology, The Ohio State University (2025)

MS Geography, Virginia Tech (2021)

BE GeoInformatics, Institue of Remote Sensing Anna University (2018)

Research Interests: Floods, Tropical Cyclone, Heat, Green Spaces

Email: bramesh1@tulane.edu

Kamun Nahar, MS

Research Coordinator (2026-)

Research Coordinator in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Tulane University. She holds a Master of Science in Environmental Health Sciences from New York University. With an interdisciplinary background spanning environmental health and mechanical engineering, Kamrun has experience in environmental exposure assessment, air pollution research, data collection, and scientific project coordination.

Prior to joining Tulane, she worked as a Graduate Assistant at NYU Langone Medical Center and served as a Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at NITER.

Research Interests: Air quality, Environmental exposure assessment, Climate and health, and Population health impacts of environmental pollutants

Email: knahar@tulane.edu

Chowdhury Arafat Hossain, MS

Graduate Research Assistant (2024-)

Arafat is a great man who commits wizardry with datasets and long-term trends and impacts of heat across the Gulf South. He is the stone upon which we build our lab.

Research Interests: Remote Sensing, Sensor and Filter based air quality monitoring, Big Data Analysis and Supercomputing, Longitudinal and Clustered Data Analysis, Machine Learning

Email: chossain@tulane.edu

Rica Pagay Monis, MS

Graduate Research Assistant (2025-)

PhD student with research interests in the intersections of climate and population health, with an academic background in ecology and molecular physiology. My most recent work focuses on the association between exposure to petrochemical facility emissions and acute respiratory and cardiovascular health outcomes in Louisiana.

M.S. in Environmental Health Sciences (University of Washington, 2025)

B.S. in Molecular Environmental Biology and

B.A. in Public Health (University of California, Berkeley, 2023)

Research Interests: Climate science, environmental exposures, population health

Email: rmonis@tulane.edu

Md. Akib Al-Zubayer, MS

Graduate Research Assistant (2026-)

PhD student in Environmental Health Sciences at Tulane University. Current research focuses on mental health-related emergency department utilization in the U.S. Gulf Coast. I develop data-driven epidemiologic and statistical methods to investigate mental health, chronic diseases, and environmental health using large-scale healthcare and environmental datasets.

Prior to joining Tulane, I worked as a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), where I conducted research on maternal and child health, noncommunicable diseases, and mental health. I hold B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Statistics from Khulna University, Bangladesh.

Research Interests: Climate and health, Environmental epidemiology, Mental health, Non-communicable diseases, Maternal and child health

Email: malzubayer@tulane.edu