Sabrina McCormick is a sociologist and documentary filmmaker. She is Assistant Research Faculty in the School of Public Health and Health Services at George Washington University, and Senior Fellow at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is co-Principle Investigator of a CDC-funded study on heat waves in the United States and the Primary Investigator of a National Science Foundation-funded study on the 2010 oil spill.
She recently completed an appointment as a Science & Technology Policy Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science working in the Global Change Research Program at the Environmental Protection Agency. At the EPA, she served as a core member of White House Committee on Science Needs for Climate Adaptation, and the Council on Environmental Quality Communications and Outreach Workgroup for climate adaptation.
Prior to being appointed to work at the EPA, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. There, she studied the health impacts related to climate change, including management of emergent vector-borne disease, effects of displacement due to coastal flooding, and the impacts of extreme heat.
She is currently a Lead Author on the Special Assessment being conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change entitled, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation.” www.ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/extremes-sr/index.html
Dr. McCormick is also author of No Family History: Finding the Environmental Links to Breast Cancer (Rowman & Littlefield), which is accompanied by her award-winning documentary film, and Mobilizing Science: Movements, Participation and the Remaking of Knowledge (Temple University Press).
McCormick has presented her work on four continents, and published over thirty articles and book chapters on environmental issues. Her work has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson, Tinker, Tides and Henry Luce Foundations, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Brown University in 2005.