C-EARTH

Dr. Kari Nadeau is the Chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health and John Rock Professor of Climate and Population Studies. She practices Allergy, Asthma, Immunology in children and adults. She has published over 400+ papers, many in the field of climate change and health. Dr. Nadeau, with a team of individuals and patients and families, has been able to help major progress and impact in the clinical fields of immunology, infection, asthma and allergy. Dr. Nadeau is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the U.S. EPA Children’s Health Protection Committee.

For more than 30 years, she has devoted herself to understanding how environmental and genetic factors affect the risk of developing allergies and asthma, especially wildfire-induced air pollution. Her laboratory has been studying air pollution and wildfire effects on children and adults, including wildland firefighters. Many of the health issues involving individuals and the public are increasing because of global warming, sustainability practices, and extreme weather conditions. She oversees a team working on air pollution and wildfire research along with a multidisciplinary group of community leaders, firefighters, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and policy makers. Dr. Nadeau was appointed as a member of the U.S. Federal Wildfire Commission in 2022.

Dr. Nadeau works with other organizations and institutes across the world. She is working with the WHO on a scoping

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.

Dr. Mary B. Rice MD MPH is the director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE) and the Mark and Catherine Winkler Associate Professor of Environmental Respiratory Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a pulmonary critical care physician and the director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) Institute for Lung Health, where she is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of research for the division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine.

Rice’s area of investigation focuses on the influence of environmental exposures, especially air pollution and climate change, on the respiratory health of children and adults and the development of interventions to mitigate these health effects. She is the principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded clinical trial of home air purification for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and she leads the environmental health research program of the American Lung Association Lung Health Cohort. She also co-leads the Center for Climate: Equitable and Accessible Research-based Testing for Health (C-EARTH), an NIH-funded P20 Center at Harvard Chan School, which aims to bring sustainable climate solutions to heat-stressed, low-income communities around the globe.

Rice chaired the American Thoracic Society’s Environmental Health Policy Committee 2018-2021 and in 2024 she was elected as

Research:
My research is motivated by a desire to alleviate environmental health disparities. A question we frequently ask in public health is: Why does place matter? In an effort to answer this question, my work aims to identify the specific aspects of housing, communities, and neighborhoods that shape an individual’s health. Can we understand the specific causal pathways that lead to health-relevant exposures, and can we ultimately intervene to mitigate them? How do these mechanisms lead to exposure and health disparities which burden low-income communities? Both theoretical models and empirical evidence reveal that disparities in environmental exposures can be significant. Understanding key determinants of multiple exposures can aid in developing policies to reduce these disparities.

Brief descriptions of my current research initiatives are listed below:

Housing-related exposure disparities:
This work aims to identify the proximate and contextual factors that shape environmental exposures, especially those related to housing. We have long known that poor housing conditions can be associated with poor health outcomes, but these risks cannot be alleviated without understanding the mechanisms that shape exposures. We also need to understand the social, physiological and behavioral vulnerabilities, which may amplify the health effects associated with these exposures. These questions lie at the intersection of environmental, occupational, social and behavioral health. I have

Wafaie Fawzi, MBBS, MPH, MS, DrPH is a physician and epidemiologist focused on advancing global health research, education, and practice. He is the Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences, Professor of Nutrition, Epidemiology, and Global Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Between 2011 and 2018, he served as Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard. He established and continues to lead the Nutrition and Global Health Program, an interdepartmental initiative at Harvard where over the past 25 years he sought to strengthen the evidence base for advancing human health and development. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.

He directed the design and implementation of more than 30 randomized controlled trials and numerous large observational epidemiologic studies of maternal, child, and adolescent health, and major infectious diseases. He furthered understanding of the safety and efficacy of nutritional interventions in the prevention and management of major global health threats and spurred the translation of evidence into policy and programs. His work is published in over 500 original research papers and reviews. Key findings include evidence about the benefits of nutritional supplements to increase survival and immunity among adults and children with infections. He advanced evidence and policies about the safety and benefits of integrated nutritional interventions for pregnant women, infants, and ado

Gaurab Basu, MD, MPH is a primary care physician and Director of Education and Policy at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). He is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His work focuses on the intersection of climate change, global health equity, human rights, medical education, and public policy. He practices internal medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA).

Dr. Basu has developed and evaluated numerous innovative health equity curricular programs. He is the faculty director of the HMS Climate Change, Environment and Health curricular theme, the faculty co-lead of the Harvard Chan School of Public Health Climate Change and Planetary Health interdisciplinary concentration, and co-founded the CHA Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy. He serves on the Harvard University Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability Standing Committee on Climate Education. Dr. Basu received the inaugural HMS Equity, Social Justice, and Advocacy Faculty Award and the HMS Charles McCabe Faculty Prize in Excellence. He has been a HMS Curtis Prout Academy Fellow and a Harvard Macy Scholar.

In 2021, Dr. Basu was named to the Grist 50 list of national climate leaders. In 2018, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation selected him to their Culture of …

Mollie is a public health leader with over 25 years of experience in community-based public health and community engagement. She serves as the Executive Director of The Family Van and Mobile Health Map at Harvard Medical School, where she leads efforts to advance health equity by expanding access to mobile healthcare and strengthening community health efforts. A recognized expert in health program planning and evaluation, Mollie co-authored the leading textbook on the subject and is a Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She holds an MPH in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of Michigan and a DrPH in Health Policy and Management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work emphasizes practical, community-driven approaches to addressing systemic health inequities, leveraging data and storytelling to drive impact. Mollie’s career reflects her deep commitment to ensuring that every person has the opportunity to be healthy.

I am a behavioral scientist with expertise in implementation science, cancer disparities, and community-based participatory research. My work focuses on strengthening systems in underserved communities to leverage the best available evidence for cancer prevention and control.

My research falls into three streams. First, I design and evaluate workforce development interventions to promote the use of research evidence within community-based organizations in the US and India. This work also includes examinations of the impacts of staff social networks on the uptake and use of research evidence. Second, I study the adaptation of evidence-based preventive services for use in underserved communities in the US and India. My goal is to design practice-focused guidelines for strategic adaptation so that implementing organizations can increase the impact of available interventions by leveraging practice- and research-based expertise. The third stream of my work focuses on methods to incorporate practitioner expertise into the health promotion evidence base more effectively. This includes evaluations of strategies to identify and engage critical implementation stakeholders as well as technology-based methods to gather stakeholder insight efficiently. Much of my work is conducted in partnership with community-based organizations and coalitions.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The primary aim of my research is to develop statistical methods that enable maximally rigorous and impactful uses of data to answer environmental health questions. In particular, my recent work centers on the following topics:

(1) Methods for estimation of the health impacts of complex, nationwide environmental regulations
(2) Integration of causal inference principles and methods into epidemiological cancer cluster analyses
(3) New causal inference approaches for studying the effects of environmental exposures on childhood cancer
(4) Methods for studying the impacts of climate, heat, and natural disasters on health and predicting the health impacts of future extreme climate events

Beyond causal inference, my methodological research interests include machine learning, Bayesian methods, latent variable models, spatial statistics, and time series analysis. I have applied these methods to investigate scientific questions not only in environmental health contexts but also in reproductive epidemiology, neuroimaging, social science, and cell biology.