People

I am an ecologist and epidemiologist interested in the interface of ecosystem service provisioning and human health, specifically in the context of global trends in biodiversity loss and ecosystem transformation. Since 1999, I have been conducting ecological and public health research in Madagascar. Most broadly, I am interested in local people’s dependence on natural resources for obtaining adequate health. This interest has led to various studies into connections between marine and terrestrial wildlife consumption and the incidence of micronutrient deficiencies, the importance of botanical ethnomedicines and geophagy to local health, and the eco-epidemiology of malaria and the human microbiome given current trends in biodiversity loss and land use change. 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.

Jessica Zamborain Mason is an interdisciplinary quantitative marine scientist who aims to contribute towards achieving ecologic, social and economic sustainability in the world’s fisheries.  Jessica’s research combines statistical and ecological models with empirical observational data to increase our understanding of human-environment interactions, the performance of natural resources, and inform resource management and policy. As a way to identify the best context-specific pathways to manage fisheries, she is interested in developing sustainable reference points and assessing fisheries from multiple socio-ecological dimensions. Jessica is interested in examining how natural resources, sustainable reference points, and the effective management of resources vary with ongoing environmental and socio-economic change. She completed her PhD at James Cook University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef studies (Australia) in 2021. Currently, Jessica is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Departments of Nutrition and Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Jessica’s current research takes a nutritional lens to fisheries, integrating nutritional outcomes into fisheries reference points and examining the consequences of climate change, human use and management on natural resources, human nutrition and public health. Overall, she aims to improve our understanding on nutrition-sensitive approaches to fisheries management and policy.

Khristopher Nicholas is an interdisciplinary food systems researcher interested in understanding how human behavior interacts with environmental determinants of health. Khristopher’s research goals are to (a) characterize how ‘where’ shapes ‘what’ we eat and (b) understand the role of human behavior throughout this process. The first component of this research is defining and measuring spatial dimensions of food environments as the key engagement point between individuals and their food systems. The second component of this research employs qualitative methodologies to center human behavior and lived experiences as crucial (and often overlooked) components of food systems research.
Khristopher holds a PhD in Nutrition from UNC Chapel Hill, where he employed mixed methodology to examine diet outcomes of food environments in the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador. Born in Trinidad and Tobago and raised in South Florida, Khristopher is passionate about food system advocacy both locally and globally, ranging from small island settings such as the Galápagos islands to historically excluded communities within the United States. As a postdoc in the Golden Lab, Khristopher is studying human-environment interactions through social-ecological traps in Madagascar.

Laura G Elsler is Laura Elsler is a research associate at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, at the Golden Lab. Her research investigates global nutrition vulnerability and nutrition implications of marine governance and seafood trade. She is a social-ecological modeler with 8+ years of experience combining quantitative, big data analysis (e.g., FAO landings, Comtrade, OBIS, Global Ocean Policy Document Database) with qualitative field research. Previously she advanced research on rarely quantified social and governance processes determining the sustainable use of marine environments. Laura holds a PhD in Sustainability Science from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, led a Graduate Pursuit funded by SESYNC, worked as a Research Consultant for a UN Agency, and consulted European NGOs on ocean policies. Laura has engaged with diverse audiences, from fishers and farmers through to national ministries and UN institutions. She is deeply committed to address sustainability challenges through improved (intersectional, gender, decolonial) equity in the ocean sector as a DEI lead of the ECOP UN Ocean Decade Program.

Marissa Childs is a postdoctoral fellow through the Harvard University Center for the Environment mentored by Christopher Golden and Francesca Dominici. Her research broadly seeks to understand how environmental change affects human health by combing data from remote sensing and ground measurements with methods from disease ecology and causal inference. Her current postdoc research is part of the Madagascar Climate-Smart Public Health project. 
 
Marissa received her PhD from the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. Her dissertation focused on understanding the drivers of yellow fever virus spillover into humans, quantifying the impact of gold mining on malaria transmission, and estimating the health effects of wildfire smoke pollution. 

Sappho Gilbert is a T32 postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she is mentored by Prof. Christopher Golden and Prof. Cindy Leung.  Her research interests include community and Indigenous health (particularly in the Arctic), food security, population nutrition, climate change, and research ethics.  Through her transdisciplinary, mixed methods, locally partnered work, she aims to inform evidence-based food and health policy.  Sappho completed her PhD at the Yale School of Public Health, graduated with a Master’s in Public Health from Dartmouth College, and earned a Bachelor of Science in biology with a minor in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 

Oladimeji Mudele is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health mentored by Prof. Christopher Golden and Prof. Francesca Dominici. His work centers on the application of geospatial information and data science methods for connecting climate and health outcomes/policy. He holds an M.Sc in Electronic Engineering (summa cum laude) and a Ph.D. in Electronic, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (2021) from the University of Pavia (UNIPV), Italy. Before that, he had obtained a B.Eng (Hons.) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. During his Ph.D., he was a beneficiary of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions and the German Academic Exchange Service scholarships. Between 2018 and 2019, he was a visiting scholar at the Argentinean Commission for Space Activities and the Institute of Computing of the Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil. In 2019, he received the “Premio di Laurea” award as the top international scholar in UNIPV.

Giacomo De Nicola is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, under the joint mentorship of Christopher Golden and Francesca Dominici. His research broadly seeks to design, implement and leverage modern statistical tools to address real-world problems, with a focus on applications in public health and the social sciences. His current postdoc research is part of the Climate-Smart Public Health project, where he aims at understanding and measuring the impact of climate and climate change on health outcomes in low-income settings.
 
Giacomo holds a PhD in Statistics from LMU Munich, an MSc in Economic and Social Sciences from Bocconi University, and a BSc in Statistics from the University of Florence, where he received the best student award for graduating top of his class. His research on assessing excess mortality during crises earned him a special award from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany.
 

Heather Kelahan is a PhD student studying Public Health Nutrition as part of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Population Health Sciences program. Her research focuses on the planetary health impacts of our current food system and how we can globally transition to a sustainable diet while improving nutrition. Prior to beginning the doctoral program, Heather worked with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and conducted research to better understand access and affordability barriers to nutritious food. Heather has also worked with the World Food Programme in Tajikistan where she supported the development of their Zero Hunger initiatives and Fill the Nutrient Gap analysis. Heather received an MPA in Development Practice from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in 2017, where she focused on sustainable food systems and nutrition.

Hervet Randriamady is the national research director of Madagascar Health and Environmental Research (MAHERY) and has been working with Dr. Golden since 2014. A Fulbright scholar in 2011, Hervet received his MS in Agricultural Economics at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He attended the Environmental Leadership Program at the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. Since April 2018, Hervet has been leading community-based epidemiological research in 3 rainforest communities adjacent to the 2 largest protected areas in Madagascar: Makira Natural Park and Masoala National Park. Each month, the MAHERY team targets every individual in the three communities to collect information on 23 diseases and conditions that are self-reported by roughly 1,300 individuals. MAHERY 1) monitors the growth of kids less than five years of age; 2) collects the blood pressure of individuals above 20 years old; and 3) conducts dietary intake surveys. Hervet has been the main liaison to government agencies and ministry officials to help the MAHERY team translate its findings to policy action. He is currently working with the Malagasy government to implement a climate-smart health information system, a collaboration among MAHERY, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Malaga…

Momi is an MPH candidate in the nutrition program with a concentration in planetary health. Prior to coming to Chan, Momi worked on grassroots approaches to community-led management of traditional Hawaiian aquaculture and near-shore marine areas. Momi’s research interests include the utilization of traditional ecological knowledge by indigenous communities in responding to food security threats related to climate change.

Nico Dominguez Carrero is an undergraduate researcher at Harvard College, majoring in Environmental Science and Public Policy with a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy, focusing on the intersections between climate change, health equity, and human rights. For his senior thesis, Nico is conducting a mixed-methods assessment of climate-health resilience among fishers in Southwest Madagascar, funded by the Harvard Global Health Institute and the Center for African Studies. His work quantitatively explores socio-ecological factors that support food security and resilience to environmental shocks while qualitatively exploring community perspectives on resilience and policy solutions to degrading environmental and natural resource conditions. 
Outside of research, Nico is actively engaged in policy and advocacy, including as a student intern with the Dallas Office of Environmental Quality and Sustainability and a student coordinator for the Massachussetts Fairness for Farm Workers Coalition. Most recently, Nico interned at the Department of State within the Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy where he supported efforts on global climate and health financing. 

Olivia Turner is a PhD student in Population Health Sciences studying environmental health with a focus on climate and sustainability. Her research interests are in leveraging data science and non-traditional data sources to assess the health effects of climate change and strategies for mitigation and adaptation. In 2023, Olivia graduated from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a Masters of Public Health. During this program, she completed a capstone project evaluating the opportunities for seaweed to benefit human and environmental health. Olivia worked as a software engineer and data scientist at Mathematica, analyzing data, building reporting systems, developing data pipelines, and creating interactive data visualizations for a variety of health projects in collaboration with federal agencies.

Aroniaina FALINIRINA is a PhD student at Institut Halieutique et des Sciences Marines (Fisheries and Marines Sciences Institute) at the University of Toliara – Madagascar, co-supervised by Dr. Gildas Todinanahary and Dr. Golden. He has studied marine sciences since 2014 and has focused on coral reef ecosystems. He received his bachelor’s degree in management of the biodiversity and the marine environment doing research about biological characterization of reef fisheries areas in southern Toliara. He did his Master’s degrees at the University of Reunion Island-France where he followed the Biodiversity and Tropical Ecosystems / aquatic, coastal and island course. His research dealt with the analysis of the variation of Functional and Taxonomic diversity of coral assemblages in the South-West Indian Ocean Islands. He was an intern at the research Lab UMR Ecologie mariNe TROpicale des océans Pacifique et IndiEn (ENTROPIE). Currently, in collaboration with the Harvard University TH Chan School of Public Health, and Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics/ Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences University, we are researching a project called “ARMS to reefs: a new tool to restore coral reef biodiversity, fisheries yields, and human health in Madagascar.”

Stephanie Wu is a PhD candidate in Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research interests primarily lie at the intersection of Bayesian statistics and survey statistics, and her dissertation focuses on developing weighted Bayesian clustering models to better understand the nutritional health of understudied populations using complex survey data. She has also worked on collaborative projects with applications to planetary health, infectious disease, global health, mental health, and health disparities.

Christian is a PhD Student in Biostatistics focused on applications of causal inference to problems in infectious disease, especially with an eye towards causal inference in observational settings that warrant consideration of spillover effects and other spatiotemporal complexities. He is especially interested in causal inference and estimation strategies that use machine learning or ensemble learners to mitigate the risks of model misspecification. With Chris Golden’s lab, Christian is currently working on quantifying the causal effects of deforestation on malaria incidence rates in Madagascar subject to effect heterogeneity due to ecological zone dynamics under the Climate-Smart Public Health project.