OntheWilderSide

Symposium on Climate Change and Health:
Making the Connection

Stony Brook Southampton will host some of the world’s top environmental researchers in its important “Symposium on Climate Change and Health: Making the Connection” on Friday, April 24, at 7 p.m., in Duke Lecture Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

The symposium will be led by Stony Brook Southampton Dean/VP of Administration Dr. Mary Pearl, facilitated by former UN environmental official and current SBS professor Dr. Nay Htun, and include:

• Dr. David Rogers, President of the Health and Climate Foundation, Washington, D.C.;
• Dr. Abere Mihretie, Director of the Ethiopian Anti Malaria Association (AMA);
• Dr. Madeleine Thomson, Chair, Africa Program Committee, International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University;
• Dr. Pai-Yei Whung, Chief Scientist of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency;
• Dr. James Quigley, Faculty Director, Environmental Design, Policy, and Planning, Stony Brook Southampton;
• Dr. Alan Rice, Lecturer, Chemistry, Physics and Mineral Resources, Stony Brook Southampton;
• Dr. Michael Sperazza, Lecturer, Environmental Studies, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Geography, Geology, and Physical Anthropology; and
• Anamaria Cobo de Paci, Dean of Students, Stony Brook Southampton.

Guest Biographies:
Dr. Rogers is the former chief executive of the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service.  Originally trained as an environmental scientist and oceanographer, he has over 25 years experience in research and development, working both in the government and the private sector.

Dr. Mihretie is dedicated to creating a strong and self-reliant society that can easily protect itself from major communicable diseases and problems of reproductive health. The AMA is a non-partisan, non-religious, indigenous NGO committed to empowering the community in order to improve the health of society in general and the very poor in particular. It operates throughout Ethiopia preventing the spread and mitigating the impacts of malaria, HIV/AIDS and other major communicable diseases, and providing reproductive health services by mobilizing the community and working in partnership with stakeholders.

Dr. Thomson was originally trained as a field entomologist, She has spent the last 20 years conducting operational research to support large scale health interventions, predominantly in Africa. Over time she has increasingly focused her efforts on the incorporation of climate and environmental data in health decision-making; wherever climate and environment help determine the spatial, seasonal, and year to year variation in disease transmission.

Dr. Whung serves as the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and provides program management and technical support to the EPA Science Advisor both independently and by leading the OSA staff. The Chief Scientist reports to the EPA Science Advisor and shares fully with the Science Advisor in planning, policy development and implementation, oversight, and direction of all cross-agency scientific efforts.

The new Dean/VP of Administration at Stony Brook Southampton, Dr. Pearl is the former President of Wildlife Trust, a global organization dedicated to innovative conservation science, linking ecology and health. She is co-founder of the Center for Conservation Medicine, a consortium based at Wildlife Trust linking Tufts Veterinary School, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the National Wildlife Health Center, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. She is editor of the series Methods and Cases in Conservation Science at Columbia University Press, and is co-editor of Conservation Medicine (Oxford 2002) and Conservation for the 21st Century (Oxford 1990).

Stony Brook Southampton faculty biographies are available on: http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/southampton/facultyprofiles.shtml.

Filed under: Ecology, Education, Environment, Global Warming, grassroots democracy, health, long island, politics, US Politics