Michele Barry, MD, Director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford University
Deborah Lawrence, PhD, Professor of Environmental Sciences, UVA
Ellen Bassett, PhD, Associate Professor and Chair of Urban and Environmental Planning, UVA
Dan Engel, PhD, Professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology, UVA
Tuesday 20 March | 11:30AM-1:00PM | Center for Global Health on the UVA Corner
Michele Barry, MD, FACP, is the Senior Associate Dean for Global Health and Director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health in the Stanford School of Medicine. As Director of the Yale/Stanford Johnson and Johnson Global Health Scholar Award program, she has sent over 1000 physicians overseas to underserved areas to help strengthen health infrastructure in low resource settings. Dr. Barry is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Science and is past-Chair of the Interest Group on Global Health, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at the IOM. She has been listed in Best Doctors in America and serves on the Board of Directors of the Bill and Melinda Gates funded Consortium of Universities involved in Global Health (CUGH) and the Foundation of the Advancement of International Education (FAIMER). She is a champion of the need for the global health community to become meaningfully involved in issues related to climate change.
Deborah Lawrence, PhD, is a Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the links between tropical deforestation and climate change. She has spent the past twenty-five years doing field-based research in Indonesia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Cameroon. Most recently, she has been using global climate models to explore the cumulative effect of tropical land use decisions, exploring the climate impact of land allocation among food crops, biofuels and forests across the globe. Professor Lawrence and her students conduct interdisciplinary research with partners in hydrology, atmospheric science, economics, anthropology, ethics, engineering, and law to understand the drivers and consequences of land use change. This work has gained her a Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Jefferson Science Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fulbright Scholarship. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, earned her Ph.D. (Botany) at Duke University, and received a B.A. (Biological Anthropology) from Harvard University. Current research addresses the challenge of understanding and minimizing climate impacts from forest use in the tropics and around the globe.
Ellen Bassett, PhD, is the Associate Professor and Chair of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia. Her areas of research interest and expertise are land use planning and law, climate change planning, health and the built environment, and international development. She is particularly interested in community decision-making around land and natural resources, including understanding how different societies and cultures create institutions (like property rights systems or policies) for their management.
Dan Engel, PhD, is Professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology at the UVA School of Medicine. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Indiana University (Bloomington) and a PhD in Pharmacology from Yale in 1986. He trained in molecular virology as a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton and then joined the UVA faculty in 1989. Dr. Engel’s research interests encompass molecular biology and drug discovery for pathogenic RNA viruses including influenza, Ebola, dengue and Zika viruses. In 2010 he founded Alexander Biodiscoveries, LLC, a small biotech company for antiviral drug discovery, located in Charlottesville.
Discussion will focus on advocacy in the context of planetary health, problems of underserved populations, and globalization's impact upon health in the developing world.