Home

 

I am an ecologist and epidemiologist interested in the human health impacts of environmental change, specifically in the context of global trends in biodiversity loss, climate change, and ecosystem transformation. Please visit my research projects webpage to find out what my group and I are working on.

My research is split into two broad themes: planetary health epidemiology and aquatic food systems research. Since 1999, I have been conducting ecological and public health research in Madagascar, and I am currently leading in effort in partnership with the Ministry of Health to develop a system of climate-smart public health. We are employing data science methods to understand the connections among remotely sensed climate, environmental, and agricultural data and empirical human health data. This will allow us to explore relationships among deforestation, drought, sea temperature change, and other forms of ecosystem transformation on a variety of human health outcomes.

Beyond Madagascar, I have been leading a collaborative research program that evaluates the connections among climate change, fisheries management and ocean governance, and food security and human nutrition in coastal populations around the world. Given trends in mass fisheries declines, coral bleaching, and raising sea surface temperatures that will drive fisheries away from the Equator and toward the Poles, food-insecure populations across the globe will be deprived of a critical nutritional resource. Our group tackles this subject by modeling potential health futures and determining what types of interventions may be able to buffer against these impacts.