A Healthy Breathing Environment For Every Bay Area Resident

Dr. Philip Martien, Ph.D.

Dr. Phil Martien has over three decades of experience at the Bay Area Air Quality Management District applying and evaluating chemical transport models to inform local and regional air quality planning. Most recently, Dr. Martien served as Director of the Air District’s Assessment, Inventory, and Modeling Division where he and his team compiled and evaluated emissions of air pollutants and conducted air quality modeling to estimate impacts and to support the development of air pollution reduction measures. He retired in August 2023.

A key strength he brings is a proven track record of bridging agency policies and traditional air pollution management structures to address community lived concerns. He is passionate about rethinking management practices to improve health outcomes in the most impacted, typically low-income and minority, communities. He has over 15 years of experience developing community co-led partnerships and actively listening to diverse perspectives to strengthen technical assessments and to help drive policy changes.

Starting in 2006, he led the Air District’s Community Air Risk Evaluation (CARE) Program and chaired its CARE Task Force, beginning to unite community organizations, business groups, and local and regional agencies to address air pollution impacts in the Bay Area’s most overburdened communities. Dr. Martien served as a member of the CalEPA’s Cumulative Impacts and Precautionary Approaches Work Group, which reviewed development of the first version of CalEnviroScreen, a mapping tool to identify California’s most overburdened communities. He partnered with San Francisco’s Public Health and Planning Departments to identify Air Pollution Exposure Zones used to inform local ordinances, including requirements for indoor filtration in new multi-family housing.

In 2017, Dr. Martien was an invited participant at California’s Environmental Justice and Climate Policy Solutions Dialogue convened to identify strategies to achieve greenhouse gas reduction goals, while addressing environmental justice concerns. This dialogue informed the State Legislature’s development of California Assembly Bill (AB) 617 that requires air districts to identify disadvantaged communities and adopt community emissions reduction programs. A recent focus of his work has been evaluating health impacts from air pollution in support of AB 617 and conducting equity-based assessments to examine how air pollution exposures are distributed by race and ethnicity in Bay Area communities.

He earned a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley. He holds undergraduate degrees in environmental engineering and physics.

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