How Health Drives Financial Behavior

Nail salon workers spend eight or more hours a day around polishes, removers, and adhesives that release volatile organic compounds into the air. In this episode of Risk InSight, A. Mike Ierardi, PhD, MES, MS, CIH, CSP, an occupational and environmental health scientist, discusses a new Risk Analysis study that measured VOC levels in five New York City salons minute by minute. He explains why daily averages can hide exposure spikes and how hazard indexes and occupational exposure limits work. 

In this episode of Risk InSight, host Anya Grondalski sits down with Amanda Staudt, atmospheric scientist and Executive Director of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), to explore the intersection of weather, climate, risk, and communication. Amanda shares her journey from a childhood fascination with thunderstorms to leading one of the nation's premier scientific organizations. The conversation examines how weather forecasts are created, the growing role of artificial intelligence in climate and atmospheric science, and what the latest State of the Climate report reveals about our changing planet. Whether you're a risk professional, science communicator, or simply curious about how weather and climate shape our world, this episode is for you.

This episode with professor Piotr Bialowolski of Kozminski University explores his recent study titled Health Shocks, Perceived Mortality Risk, and Financial Preferences: Longitudinal Evidence From Share  which looks at how our planning horizon's change after reciving a health shock, such as a cancer or diabetes diagnosis. 

What happens when a small piece of infrastructure fails? Researchers from UMass Amherst and an engineering firm discuss their study on culvert failures in the Deerfield Watershed and why these often-invisible structures matter far more than we realize. They model what happens when culverts fail during floods and hazardous events, and the results reveal how rural communities can suddenly lose access to essential services like hospitals and schools. They also explore why infrastructure investment now prevents harm later, and what policymakers and communities need to know about aging infrastructure in an era of climate uncertainty. Listen to learn how resilience lives in networks, not individual components, and what you can do to advocate for infrastructure investment in your own community.

Most people assume the holidays are the deadliest time to drive. The data says otherwise. In this episode of Risk InSight, host Anya Grondalski talks with Professor Michael French, PhD (University of Miami), and Gulchin Gomez, PhD (Florida Atlantic University) about their new study on traffic crashes during spring break across the entire state of Florida, not just the hotspot counties. Using 12 years of crash-level data, they compare spring break to the Thanksgiving-to-New Year's stretch and find spring break comes out more dangerous for non-fatal injuries, and alcohol isn't the main driver. The conversation covers why out-of-state drivers, young drivers, and pedestrians face sharply elevated risk and the role road density and construction zones play. French and Gomez also share what's actually working on the ground in Miami Beach, from staggered university calendars to parking rate hikes, and where they'd take this research next if better data on distracted driving existed. Listen Now!

What happens when cutting-edge biotechnology meets artificial intelligence, and who's responsible for governing it? Kate Sixt, Executive Director of the Office of the Chief Scientist at the USDA and former Principal Director for Biotechnology at the Department of Defense, breaks down why biological data is uniquely personal, why governance frameworks need to balance promotion with protection, and how diverse perspectives are essential to navigating biotech's biggest risks and opportunities. Listen now to this exciting episode interviewing one of the world's leading experts in biotechnology governance!

Every time you turn on the tap, you're trusting a complex system to keep you safe — but what happens when that system faces threats we're still learning to understand? In this episode of Let's Talk Risk, host Anya Grondalski speaks with three researchers on the front lines of drinking water safety. In this episode of Let's Talk Risk, Dr. Alexis Morass of The College of New Jersey breaks down Legionnaires' disease — a waterborne pneumonia with a fatality rate that dwarfs COVID-19's peak — and shares findings from a nationwide study examining how different disinfection strategies affect disease rates across U.S. water utilities. She explains why temperature, geography, and funding gaps make this research as urgent as it is complicated. Then, research assistant Emily Julian and Dr. Jade Mitchell of Michigan State University introduce a new risk-ranking framework designed to help water utilities prioritize emerging contaminants that aren't yet on their radar through chemical properties and decision analytics to focus resources where the risk is greatest. Listen now!

"Forever chemicals" have been in headlines for years, but are people actually getting the information they need to protect themselves? In this episode, we sit down with Lyn van Swol, professor in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison, and graduate researcher Rachel Hutchins, co-authors of a newly published study in the journal Risk Analysis. They analyzed the top 98 websites Americans visit when searching for PFAS information in drinking water. We dig into why government and public health communicators tend to downplay severity and what messaging frames actually motivate people to act. Listen now!

When we think about communicating risk, we often focus on the evidence: the data, the models, the science. But what if the words we choose to frame that risk are just as important as the risk itself?  In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a leading researcher in risk perception and behavioral science at the University of Southern California's Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy and Government Service, to explore what the science really says about communicating climate risk to the public. In this conversation, Dr. Bruine de Bruin shares findings from two recent studies on climate risk messaging: what works, what doesn't, and why reaching across political divides might be more possible than you'd expect — if you get the words right. Listen now!

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Zachary Collier, assistant professor at Radford University and longtime member of the Society for Risk Analysis, to explore a hidden but increasingly urgent problem in global supply chains: intellectual property theft through overproduction. Drawing on his research in semiconductor supply chains, Dr. Collier explains how designers and manufacturers navigate trust, incentives, and risk with millions of dollars on the line. He breaks down how game theory helps illuminate the strategic decisions each party faces, why overproduction is so difficult to detect, and how approaches like split manufacturing can reduce vulnerability.