Thursday, April 9 – "Climate Change and Human Health: Impacts and Opportunities"
Joel Schwartz, Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Sam Myers, Senior Research Scientist, Dept. of Environmental Health
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health presents: "Climate Change and Human Health: Impacts and Opportunities" with Joel Schwartz, Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Sam Myers, Senior Research Scientist, Dept. of Environmental Health.
Joel Schwartz is a Professor of Environmental Epidemiology in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Department of Environmental Health and Department of Epidemiology. He is interested in epidemiology looking at the health consequences of exposure to pollutants. To date this has had two focuses: health effects of lead and health effects of air pollutants. He has recently begun work looking at water contamination. He also researches the effects of antioxidants on respiratory health and the use of cost benefit analysis to make environmental decisions.
Sam Myers is a Senior Research Scientist in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Department of Environmental Health; an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School; and Staff Physician at Mount Auburn Hospital. Dr. Myers focuses his work at the intersection of human health and global environmental change. Dr. Myers worked for two years as the founding Field Manager of an integrated conservation and human health project in the Qomolangma Nature Preserve in Tibet. He then worked in the Global Health Bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as an AAAS fellow where he designed a new mechanism for administering and studying projects that integrate human health, population growth, and environmental change in developing countries. After two years as an AAAS fellow, Dr. Myers was hired by Conservation International as a Senior Director to run the Healthy Communities Initiative, a $5 million project to design and implement integrated conservation and human health activities in biodiversity hotspot regions around the world.
After finishing a clinical research fellowship in general medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Dr. Myers began a research career focused on quantifying the human health impacts of large scale, anthropogenic environmental change. He is currently the principle investigator on three transdisciplinary research projects that include: 1) quantifying the impact of rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 on the nutrient content of crops and the impacts of these changes on the distribution of deficiencies of micronutrients like iron and zinc for the national populations of 182 countries; 2) quantifying the importance of access to terrestrial and marine wildlife species as a source of macro and micronutrients in the diets of subsistence populations; and 3) quantifying the human health impacts of landscape fires in SE Asia and developing new tools that allow fine-grained modeling of the specific morbidity and mortality for a particular population attributable to specific land use types and geographic locations.