Pediatric emergency medicine physician Dr. Rammy Assaf has been selected by the Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences (COHS) Faculty Assembly Research & Library Committee at UC Irvine as the recipient of the 2026 COHS Faculty Assembly Clinical COHS Team Research Award.
Dr. Assaf was honored for research aimed at understanding climate anxiety in young populations, a project he performed with Jun Wu, PhD, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health at UCI.
In addition to his role at Rady Children’s, Dr. Assaf is a health science assistant clinical professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the UCI School of Medicine.
Groundbreaking work
The award recognizes COHS faculty who demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaboration can lead to clinical research findings that advance the health of patients and communities.
The research of Dr. Assaf and Wu produced groundbreaking work at the intersection of climate change, mental health, and pediatric emergency medicine, exemplifying the synergistic, cross-school collaboration that the COHS Faculty Assembly awards are designed to recognize.
The two will be formally recognized at a ceremony in May.
“One may not intuitively think of the emergency department (ED) as a good data collection site for research related to climate change,” Dr. Assaf said. “However, if you look at the mounting evidence behind the concurrent generational-defining crises of mental health and climate change among young people today, who are increasingly using the ED as a source of health care, you’ll notice they heavily intersect. It’s a real honor for our work to be recognized, especially as climate anxiety research has traditionally focused on adults rather than adolescents and teenagers.”
A key partnership
Dr. Assaf joined Rady Children’s Health Orange County in 2022. He has received recognition for launching a novel digital screening tool with the department of social work to provide direct navigation services to patients and families with urgent social need who visit the ED and a handful of other clinical sites across Rady Children’s Health Orange County.
In his work assessing climate anxiety,Dr. Assaf brought clinical expertise in pediatric emergency care, social drivers of health, and direct access to the patient population through his clinical attending role and academic role at UCI. Dr. Wu contributed expertise in environmental health, climate-health research methodology, and epidemiology.
Together, their partnership created a research program that neither school could have achieved independently — connecting the clinical reality of adolescent mental health presentations in the ED with the broader environmental and public health context of climate anxiety.
The collaborative nature of the work is founded in a blend of research and advocacy in the developing field of climate health, investigating the link between two escalating phenomena: emergency health service utilization for adolescent mental health crises and the widespread impacts of a deteriorating climate.
A novel contribution
While climate anxiety has traditionally focused on adults, the work of Dr. Assaf and Wu centers on adolescents, a generation that will bear the biggest impacts of climate change.
They teamed with a pioneer in the field, Susan Clayton, PhD, of The College of Wooster in Ohio, during the entirety of project design and implementation.
The team established what is believed to be the first clinical research program in the nation to systematically assess climate anxiety among adolescents within a pediatric ED setting — a novel contribution that bridges environmental health science with frontline clinical care.
Study participant enrollment was conducted by a diverse pool of UCI Bio 199 students taking a for-credit research internship in the pediatric ED, allowing the students to learn about conducting scientific studies.
Scholarly and advocacy contributions
The researchers’ first publication, “Climate Anxiety Among Adolescents in a Pediatric Emergency Department” (Environmental Research: Health, 2025), enrolled 744 adolescent patients ages 12–17 in the pediatric ED, examining demographic and clinical predictors of climate anxiety. The data was collected between January and December 2024.
Findings demonstrated that climate anxiety is prevalent among ED patients and is associated with generalized anxiety and socioeconomic disadvantage, establishing that climate-related mental health concerns are relevant to clinical practice in pediatric emergency settings. These findings also were featured in a nationally syndicated media piece.
The team’s second publication, “An Adolescent-Caregiver Dyad Approach to Climate Anxiety in the Pediatric Emergency Department” (INQUIRY, 2026), advanced the research by examining the relationship between caregiver and adolescent climate anxiety using a novel dyad approach.
The researchers investigated how caregivers’ community-level environmental concerns are associated with adolescent climate anxiety, providing critical insights into the family-level dynamics of climate-related mental health in clinical settings.
Notably, while caregiver climate anxiety itself did not directly predict adolescent climate anxiety, caregivers’ community-level concerns — including housing, public services, and environmental issues –were significantly associated with adolescent climate anxiety, suggesting an indirect transmission pathway through shared environmental and social conditions.
A third manuscript is currently in development. The team is conducting transcription, coding, and qualitative data analysis from adolescent climate health interviews and future orientation questionnaire data. This study aims to deepen the understanding of how climate change shapes adolescents’ mental health and future outlook, further advancing this emerging body of evidence.
Dr. Wu is also leading a study on psychological mechanisms related to climate anxiety among college students, with Dr. Assaf as a contributor.
On the advocacy front, Dr. Assaf wrote a resolution entitled “Assessment of Climate Related Distress in Adolescent Well Visits,” which was passed by American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) voting members during the 2025 Annual Leadership Conference. He also produced an Op-Ed featured in MedPage Today raising awareness on youth mental health and climate change.
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