Today was one of those days that reminds you why you got into this business in the first place.
Our NSF-funded Center to Stream Healthcare in Place (C2SHiP) runs a weekly ThinkTank — a freewheeling hour where we bring in thinkers from all over the map to challenge us. We’ve hosted engineers, clinicians, data scientists, and FDA officials. But today’s speaker was special. Today I had the privilege of introducing my daughter, Natalie Armstrong.
Natalie is a PhD student in Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a CLF-Lerner Fellow, and an inaugural Fellow in the Johns Hopkins Digital Health and AI for Health Fellowship. Before Hopkins, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Greenland, a researcher at Caltech, and a Program Officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She’s building a career at the intersection of energy, environmental health, and the science-to-policy pipeline.
Her talk — “A FEW Paths Forward” — applied the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus to a problem hiding in plain sight: the public health impacts of data center development. In Pima County, Arizona, data centers powering cloud computing and AI are expanding rapidly in a region already dealing with extreme heat and chronic water scarcity. Working in partnership with the Pima County Health Department, Natalie is mapping both the direct pathways (heat, noise, air emissions) and the indirect ones (water system strain, land-use change) that single-resource assessments routinely miss.
This work matters for everyone at the table. Local and state decision makers need rigorous, integrated health impact data to guide zoning and permitting. Hyperscalers and the broader tech industry need frameworks that anticipate community health concerns before they become regulatory roadblocks. And communities themselves need transparent, systems-level evidence to advocate for their own well-being as digital infrastructure expands into their neighborhoods and watersheds. The FEW nexus gives all of these stakeholders a shared language — and a shared set of tools — to get to yes or no, faster and together.
Here’s what makes this so delicious for our group: C2SHiP exists to stream healthcare digitally. We are, quite literally, in the business of generating data that lives in those data centers. Natalie walked into our house and asked us to think about the health costs of building it. That’s exactly the kind of productive discomfort that makes a ThinkTank worth showing up for.
I have always said that my favorite thing in the world is putting weird ideas together with weird people. Today, the universe served that up with a side of pure parental pride.
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