Recognizing the growing threat that climate and other global environmental changes are posing to health, NIEHS’ senior leadership has identified the linkages among climate, environment, and health as a priority for educating the Institute’s staff, including its doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows. To meet this need, the Global Environmental Health (GEH) program is launching a new seminar series, “Climate, Environment, and Health,” to provide an ongoing opportunity for NIEHS staff as well as our broader GEH community to receive training.
The NIEHS CEH seminars will bring in subject matter experts once a month for the lectures. In the current period of travel restrictions because of the COVID-19 crisis, the series will start off as webinars, which will be archived and made available to the general public. Future in-person seminars taking place at the NIEHS Research Triangle Park campus will be broadcast, archived, and made available to the public as well. A headline event for the series will occur on Global Environmental Health Day, scheduled for July 1, 2020, which will feature leading researchers to hone in on specific topics.
Balbus (Left) and West (Right) will be lecturers for the seminar series.
(Photo courtesy of Steve McCaw & Jason West)
The series is intended to initially provide a thorough introduction to climate change and its health implications, related to not only the impacts of a changing environment, but also the health implications of climate actions. The full set of learning objectives for the series includes: recognizing the broad scope and scale of health impacts related to climate and other global environmental change; identifying the sources of relevant earth observations and other datasets to perform research; identifying vulnerability and risk factors and the relationship between climate vulnerability and health disparities; and describing the challenges and approaches to communicating about climate change and health.
Introductory lecturers include GEH program director John Balbus, M.D., and University of North Carolina professor Jason West, Ph.D. For more information and to see the current seminar series schedule, check the GEH Homepage.
