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Harvard Medical School
401 Park Drive, 2nd Floor East
Boston, MA 02215
Tel: 617.384.8530
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Introduction: Lecturer Biographies

Introduction and Course Overview
Paul R. Epstein, MD, MPH, Harvard Medical School

Paul R. Epstein, M.D., M.P.H. is Associate Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School and is a medical doctor trained in tropical public health. Paul has worked in medical, teaching and research capacities in Africa, Asia and Latin America and, in 1993, coordinated an eight-part series on Health and Climate Change for the British medical journal, Lancet. He has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Academy of Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to assess the health impacts of climate change and develop health applications of climate forecasting and remote sensing. Paul is coordinating the international project Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions, with support from Swiss Re and the United Nations Development Programme. This project involves scientists, UN agencies, NGOs and corporate/financial sector leaders in the assessment of the new risks and opportunities presented by a changing climate. 

Why We Are Giving This Course
Eric Chivian, MD, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Eric Chivian holds an A.B. degree cum Laude in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College, and a M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He is Founder and Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, at Harvard Medical School. In 1980, he co-founded (with Professors Bernard Lown, Herbert Abrams, and James Muller) International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

During the past 14 years, Dr. Chivian has worked to involve physicians in the United States and abroad in efforts to protect the environment, and to increase public understanding of the potential human health consequences of global environmental change. As part of these activities, he designed and organized the 1992 MIT/Harvard School of Public Health symposium “Human Health and the Environment: the Medical Consequences of  Environmental Degradation”, and was senior editor and author of  MIT Press’ Critical Condition: Human Health and the Environment. The book, published in 1993, the first on the subject for a general audience, has been used as a text at several medical schools, schools of public health, and universities in the United States and abroad. Editions have been published in German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Persian.

In 1996, Dr. Chivian founded and became director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, the first center at a medical school in the United States focusing on the human health dimensions of global environmental change. The Center (designated an official “Collaborating Center” of the United Nations Environment Programme) has developed and directed the Harvard Medical School course “Human Health and Global Environmental Change” (which has been disseminated to 65 other medical schools, colleges, and universities in the U.S. and abroad); has held briefings and courses for the U.S. Congress; has been a consultant to the U.S. State Department, the Department of Defense, NOAA, NASA, and the EPA; and has advised the Environmental Ministers of the G8 nations on the health impacts of global climate change

Currently, he directs a project under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the U.N.'s Convention on Biological Diversity, and the World Conservation Union (IUCN) that is preparing the most comprehensive report yet available on the subject “Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity,” which will be published as a book in 2007 by Oxford University Press, and presented to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the U.S. Congress, the European Union, and other policy-maker bodies.

In 1978, Dr. Chivian, with Drs. Helen Caldicott and Ira Helfand, revived Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), and two years later, he designed and organized the first major public symposium on “The Medical Consequences of Nuclear War,” which achieved widespread international press attention and which catalyzed PSR’s national campaign to prevent nuclear war.

Dr. Chivian was the senior editor and author of Last Aid: The Medical Dimensions of Nuclear War, published in 1982 by W. H. Freeman and Co. (Scientific American), which also appeared in German, Italian, and Japanese editions. In the mid 1980s, he directed the first scientific survey of American and Soviet teenagers’ attitudes about nuclear war and the future for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and MIT’s Center for International Studies.

Dr. Chivian was also Director of PSR’s Project on Global Environmental Change and Health from 1993 to 1996. During this time, he was senior author of a report prepared for the White House, “Environmental Health: Issues for Health Care Reform”, was a consultant to the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and a U.S. Government reviewer of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II 2nd Assessment Report.

Dr. Chivian has lectured widely in the U.S. and abroad, and has appeared on national television and radio and in the print media in several countries. He has over 40 publications. His area of interest is the human health consequences of habitat degradation, species loss, and ecosystem disruption.

Methods in Environmental Health
Melissa Perry, MHS, ScD, Harvard School of Public Health

Dr. Perry came to the Harvard School of Public Health bringing research interests in agricultural health and preventive intervention research.  Over the past 14 years she has conducted behavioral epidemiology and preventive intervention studies targeting a number of health endpoints including occupational injury and disease.  She recently completed a six-year study of farm based preventive interventions to reduce hazardous exposures to pesticides in farmers and their families.  She is currently conducting studies of noise and chemical exposure synergies in farm youth, hormone altering effects of pesticide exposures in farmers and their families, and laceration injuries in meatpacking workers.  She is collaborating on pesticide and agriculture studies in South Africa, Tanzania, Ghana, and China.  She previously taught EH202 Principles of Environmental Health, and is also currently teaching EH282 Injury Epidemiology and Prevention.  She is Co-Director of the Occupational Injury Prevention Research Training Program and advises students concentrating in occupational and environmental epidemiology.

How to Prepare for This Course
Daniel A. Goodenough, PhD, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Goodenough is an internationally recognized cell biologist and is one of the most celebrated and popular teachers at Harvard Medical School. He has been in the forefront of trying to promote social responsibility among medical students at Harvard and has been a central figure in working to introduce curricula on health and global environmental change. He is on the Committee on the Environment at Harvard University.