Population Health Epidemiology | Informatics | Climate & Health

Peter Graffy, PhD, MPH

I build epidemiologic and informatics tools that link clinical, environmental, and geospatial data to measure health risks and support better decisions for patients, communities, and climate-vulnerable workforces.

Peter Graffy

Pulmonary & Critical Care Postdoctoral Fellow

Center for Computational Medicine and Clinical Artificial Intelligence, University of Chicago

  • Co-founder, Straia Health
  • Luther College
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Northwestern University

About

Computational public health, grounded in real-world clinical data.

I am a pulmonary and critical care postdoctoral fellow in the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, a prior American Heart Association predoctoral fellow in Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University, and co-founder of Straia Health.

My work focuses on electronic health record linkage for population health surveillance, dynamic risk prediction, and machine learning methods that make clinical and environmental data more useful. I have built computer-aided detection and geolinkage tools that use protected health information in HIPAA-compliant workflows to improve individual and community health outcomes.

Through Straia, I am helping develop climate-health intelligence products, including HeatScope, to quantify environmentally driven health risk and help organizations act earlier. My dissertation evaluated the impact of climate change-related extreme heat in Chicago through community-level assessment and individual-level computational phenotypes integrating EHR and ecological data.

01

Climate & health

Extreme heat exposure, cardiovascular vulnerability, and public health surveillance.

02

Clinical AI

Phenotyping, risk prediction, and automated tools for clinically meaningful measurement.

03

Geospatial linkage

Privacy-preserving workflows connecting health encounters with place-based context.

04

Climate-health products

Applied tools that translate environmental hazard forecasts into timely health-risk action.

Projects

Tools and analyses for clinical, climate, and community data.

Company & Product

Straia Health & HeatScope

As co-founder of Straia Health, I help develop intelligence tools for environmentally driven health risk. HeatScope combines climate data, observed health outcomes, structural risk factors, and modeling to help teams understand where extreme heat may drive excess deaths, emergency visits, and EMS calls.

  • Advanced heat-health intelligence
  • Community-level aggregated data with no PHI
  • Decision support for earlier interventions

Climate Data Tool

Daymet DeGAUSS Tool

A Docker-based geospatial linkage tool for connecting geocoded patient encounters with Daymet surface weather and climate variables at 1 km resolution.

  • Designed for large encounter datasets
  • Works with HIPAA-compliant DeGAUSS architecture
  • Supports R and Python research workflows
Explore the tool

Critical Care & Environment

REFER Study

A multicenter critical-care research program linking ambient air pollution exposure, respiratory failure phenotypes, and ICU outcomes to quantify environmental risk in severe illness.

  • National acute respiratory failure cohort
  • Environment-informed phenotyping
  • Manuscript under review at The Lancet Planetary Health
View preprint

Civic Data

Chicago Crime Map

An interactive Shiny app mapping Chicago crime reports for northern wards, built for neighborhood-level exploration by type, date, and location.

  • Uses Chicago Data Portal records
  • Supports interactive map review
  • Includes companion trend summaries

Publications

Selected high-impact publications and preprints.

Media & Mentions

Coverage and public references to my work.

Associated Press | 2026

Heat makes emergency rooms busier

National AP coverage of the Science Advances heat-wide association study linking extreme heat with a wider range of emergency and urgent-care diagnoses.

Read coverage

The New York Times | 2026

Saving old trees might save lives

Climate Forward coverage of the GeoHealth tree-canopy mortality study and the public-health value of protecting mature urban trees.

Read coverage

The Cool Down | 2026

Protecting mature trees could save more than 100 lives each year

Public-facing coverage of the tree-canopy study's estimate that small sustained canopy gains could prevent more than 100 deaths per year.

Read coverage

Inside Climate News | 2026

Extreme heat's toll goes beyond the obvious

Climate-health reporting on the 2026 heat-wide diagnosis findings and why conventional heat-illness tracking may miss a larger burden.

Read coverage

Live Science | 2026

Old trees may protect people's health

Science coverage of the Chicago tree-canopy analysis and why preventing canopy loss can matter as much as planting new trees.

Read coverage

FOX 32 Chicago | 2026

Tree canopy loss linked to mortality

Broadcast coverage of the Northwestern tree-canopy work and its implications for neighborhood-level health and heat resilience.

Watch segment

Yale Climate Connections | 2025

A new tool aims to prevent the next heat tragedy

Feature coverage of Chicago heat vulnerability work on the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Chicago heat wave.

Read coverage

CBS News Chicago | 2025-2026

Heat-vulnerability tools inform Chicago cooling investments

Broadcast and local coverage of research tools used to identify communities at elevated risk during extreme heat.

Medical & Science Coverage | 2020-2026

Clinical AI and heat-health studies picked up broadly

Additional coverage of heat-related diagnoses and CT-based biomarkers for cardiovascular risk prediction.

Beyond Work

Still chasing hard efforts.

Outside of research, I spend most of my time being active, coaching or playing sports, and with family and friends. I played collegiate soccer and was an internationally recognized ultimate frisbee player with multiple national championships. I now compete in fitness races such as CrossFit and Hyrox, with my sights set on a sub-9H Leadville 100 MTB race.

Peter Graffy playing ultimate frisbee Peter Graffy at a Hyrox event

Contact

Interested in climate-health data, clinical AI, or collaboration?

petergraffy@gmail.com