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Workshop on Population, Health and the Environment

Expert Discussants

Paul Epstein is associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. He is a widely published public health physician and medical educator with expertise in the areas of marine ecosystems, infectious diseases, and global climate change. He has served in medical, teaching and research capacities in Africa, Asia and Latin America and has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to assess the health effects of climate change and to develop health applications for climate forecasting and remote-sensing technologies.

Dr. Epstein is an author of both the Health Section of the IPCC 2nd Assessment Report and the WHO/WMO/UNEP report Climate Change and Human Health. Most recently, he published "Global Warming Harmful to Health?" in Scientific American http://www.sciam.com/issue.cfm. He was a recipient of a National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's Office of Global Programs and NASA grant to study the health, ecological, and economic dimensions of global change in marine environments (http://www.med.harvard.edu/chge, resources).

Patsy Healey is Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, and Director of the Centre for Research in European Urban Environments at the University of Newcastle, UK. She has a first degree in geography, and a doctorate in urban and regional planning, both from the University of London. She is also a qualified urban planner, and worked in local planning authorities in London before becoming an academic. She is a specialist in planning theory and urban planning practices, and in urban development processes. Her doctoral studies took her to Latin America, where she examined the ideas about planning in use in various practices, in relation to the dynamics of ongoing urban development processes. Since then, she has examined these interrelationships through studies of the ideas planners use in practice in the UK and where they come from; the nature of plan-making processes and their impact on urban development; the way in which planning processes and property development processes interact; and how new ideas about government and policy processes are affecting the ongoing practices of urban governance, especially in weak urban economies.

She is particularly interested in the potential for more collaborative processes which bring ordinary citizens as well as elites into governance processes, and in integrated ways of developing policy programmes which enhance quality of life and local environments. She has published extensively on these topics in articles, books and reports. Recent contributions include: Managing Cities (John Wiley 1995), Collaborative Planning (Macmillan 1997), Making Strategic Spatial Plans: Innovation in Europe (UCL Press, 1997), and Planning, Governance and Spatial Strategy in Britain (Macmillan 2000). Among other commitments, she is a member of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Housing and Neighbourhoods Research Committee and editor of the new journal, Planning Theory and Practice. She is past president of the Association of European Schools of Planning and a founder member of the UK Academy for Learned Societies in the Social Sciences. She was awarded an OBE by the Queen in 1999.

Lori M. Hunter, Ph.D., is a Faculty Research Associate in the Program on Environment and Behavior of the Institution of Behavioral Sciences and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She conducts research and publishes in several areas of Human-Environment interactions including: 1) migration and environmental risk, 2) public perception of environmental issues (e.g., biodiversity, recycling), 3) the social distribution of environmental hazards (i.e., environmental justice), and 4) population dynamics and land use change. She recently completed a report for the RAND Corporation's Population Matters series entitled, The Environmental Implications of Population Dynamics. More detailed information on Dr. Hunter's research agenda can be found at http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/news/news0007.html#Focus

Jeff Jacquez develops and applies spatial statistics to elucidate underlying space-time processes in the environmental, biological and health sciences. The basic problem is to identify possible processes that produce an observed spatial pattern, and Dr. Jacquez's research includes applications in disease clustering, epidemiology, environmental monitoring and population genetics. He has developed and applied novel spatial methods for geographic boundary detection, disease clustering and image analysis, using approaches such as fuzzy algebra, Monte Carlo randomization, and spatially constrained clustering. Current interests include error analysis and propagation in spatial statistics, the implementation of space-time information systems, and the spatial analysis of high resolution images for exposure assessment.

Andrew Keeler is Associate Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Georgia. He has a Ph.D. in Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Keeler worked for three years as a food and nutrition economist for the United Republic of Tanzania as a United Nations staff member. More recently, he was a Senior Economist at the Innovative Strategies and Economics Group of the US Environmental Protection Agency. He is currently serving as Senior Staff Economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisers, where he has general responsibility for environmental matters and was part of the US diplomatic delegation to the COP-6 climate change negotiations in the Hague.

Dr. Keeler has published on a variety of topics in environmental and resource economics, including market-based incentives, enforcement of environmental laws, solid waste policy, ecological information in economic models, and environmental justice. Current research interests include the implementation and enforcement of climate change policies, coastal land use economics, and the interaction of environmental and tax policy.

Herbert W. Kroehl is Chief of the Solar-Terrestrial Physics Division of the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Director of the Word Data Center for Solar-Terrestrial Physics, and Secretary General of the International Association for Geomagnetism and Aeronomy. He has published extensively in space science using data collected on operational weather satellites. His current interests focus on Earth system science including the land cover change, land use change, monitoring of wildfires and centers of population captured in satellite imagery. NGDC manages and monitors data covering the disciplines of space science, paleoclimatology, marine geology, marine geophysics, and other environmental sciences measured by ground-based and satellite-borne instruments. Specifically, his division manages data collected by satellites in the DMSP, GOES and POES programs. Kroehl currently serves on the NRC Committee on Solar-Terrestrial Research.

Sara McLafferty is Professor of Geography at Hunter College of the City University of New York and a member of the doctoral faculties in Earth and Environmental Science and Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests include the use of spatial analysis methods and geographic information systems to analyze health and social problems in cities, and gender- and racial-differences in geographical access to services and employment opportunities. She has directed a range of health-related research projects including the analysis of geographic variation in low birth weight, spatial clustering of breast cancer, and modeling risk of vector-borne disease. She is currently co-principal investigator on a collaborative project developing innovative spatial statistical methods to visualize and analyze crime patterns. Dr. McLafferty is co-author of Location Strategies for Retail and Service Firms (with Dr. Avijit Ghosh) and is currently writing a book on Geographic Information Systems and Public Health, co-authored with Dr. Ellen Cromley. She has published in a wide range of geography, epidemiology, and urban studies journals. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Economic Geography and Health and Place, and was a member of the Mapping Science Committee of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. John W. Peabody, MD, DTM&H, M.Phil, PhD, FACP, is the Deputy Director of the Institute for Global Health (IGH) and heads up the health policy activities. He has been a full-time member of the University of California since 1995 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Medicine. Dr. Peabody has published articles on international comparative health policy, quality of care, measuring and changing provider practice, changing financial incentives in primary care, and the organization and financing of health care systems. He is the lead author of Policy and Health: Implications for Development in Asia, published by Cambridge University Press.

For five years at RAND he was a senior scientist and principal investigator for over nine separate projects with $3 million in funding. Funding was from a variety of sources: the NIH, VA HSR&D, World Bank, national governments in Asia and Eastern Europe and the Asian Development Bank. Before joining RAND, Dr. Peabody worked for the World Health Organization in Geneva and Manila for three years; he also spent two years as Director for Project Hope in China. From 1995 to 1999, he was in the Department of Medicine at UCLA. In 1999, he was elected a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Mitch Renkow is Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University. He is also an affiliate of the Economics Program of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in El Batan, Mexico. Dr. Renkow has conducted field research in South Asia and East Africa, and has published extensively on a variety of topics in development economics, including household storage and marketing behavior, the welfare effects of technology adoption, the rural nonfarm economy, rural poverty alleviation, agricultural research resource allocation, and infrastructure planning. For more information go to http://www.ag-econ.ncsu.edu/faculty/renkow/renkow.html.

Mathew Schwaller is Manager of Science Data and External Interfaces for NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System. EOSDIS provides data services for NASA's suite of Earth observations satellites, including satellite operations, data capture, generation of nearly 1 Terabyte of data products per day, and distribution of about 1/2 million science data products per month. Dr. Schwaller has been involved with EOSDIS nearly since its inception: in engineering the design, implementation, testing, and operations of various parts of the system. He has recently been involved with extending EOSDIS data and services to the science community through the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, by developing an engineering testbed for data distribution for the Global Observation of Forest Cover program, and through his participation in the Committee on Earth Observations Satellites. Prior to joining the engineering staff of EOSDIS, Dr. Schwaller conducted graduate and post-graduate research on remote sensing of vegetation.

Robert B. Wallace (MD, Northwestern University, 1967, MS Epidem., SUNY Buffalo, 1972) is Irene Ensminger Stecher Professor of Preventive Medicine and Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. His general interests are in defining risk factors for and interventions to prevent the disabling conditions of older persons. He has been the Iowa site principal investigator for two long term cohort studies, including the Lipid Research Clinics Program Population Study and the Iowa Established Population for Epidemiologic Study of the Elderly. He is also the site principal investigator for several long-term clinical trials including the Women's Health Initiative and the Fracture Intervention Trial. He has been a member of the US Preventive Services Task Force (Second Panel, DHHS) and the National Advisory Committee on Aging of the National Institute on Aging. He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, the Journal of Health and Aging and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. His current research specifically focuses on several areas, including: the assessment of hygienic behaviors, such as diet, smoking and exercise in the genesis of physical disability and major chronic conditions of older persons; the role of social support as a risk factor for disease and disability; the use of estrogen replacement therapy, bisphosphonates and selective estrogen receptor modulator agents in the prevention of coronary disease, breast cancer and clinical fractures; the provision of safe mobility among drivers; the determination of effective preventive interventions for older persons; and the role of depression and other mental conditions in the onset and progression of disability and disabling illnesses.