Physicians for Human Rights

Samuel Myers, MD, MPH, Director, Planetary Health Alliance

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Samuel Myers, MD, MPH studies the human health impacts of accelerating disruptions to Earth’s natural systems, a field recently dubbed Planetary Health.  He is a Principal Research Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is Director of the Planetary Health Alliance (www.planetaryhealthalliance.org).  

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Sam’s current work spans several areas of planetary health including 1) the global nutritional impacts of rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere; 2) the health impacts of land management decisions in SE Asia associated with biomass burning and particulate air pollution; 3) the nutritional impacts of reduced access to wildlife (bushmeat) in the diet in Madagascar; 4) the local (in Madagascar) and global consequences of fisheries decline for human nutrition and health; and 5) the impact of animal pollinator declines on human nutrition at a global scale.  As the Director of the Planetary Health Alliance, Sam oversees a multi-institutional effort to support research, education and policy efforts around the world focused on understanding and quantifying the human health impacts of disrupting Earth’s natural systems  and translating that understanding into resource management decisions globally. Dr. Myers serves as a Commissioner on the Lancet-Rockefeller Foundation Commission on Planetary Health and was the inaugural recipient of the Arrell Global Food Innovation in 2018. He has also been awarded the Prince Albert II of Monaco—Institut Pasteur Award for research at the interface of global environmental change and human health.

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Kennedy E. Jensen, Institute for Circumpolar Health Research

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Kennedy graduated from Dartmouth College in 2018 where she studied Biology, Anthropology, and Ethics. Her interests in Planetary Health and Medical Anthropology led her to the Northwest Territories where she works with the Institute for Circumpolar Health Research as a Lombard Fellow. Kennedy will matriculate at Geisel School of Medicine in August 2019 where she hopes to continue working within medicine and public health to address illness at it coalesces with poverty and oppression. 

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Anant Sundaram, PhD, Clinical Professor of Business Administration at Dartmouth College

 

Professor Anant K. Sundaram is on the finance faculty at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. His areas of expertise are business valuation, assessing the corporate financial impacts of climate change, mergers & acquisitions/corporate governance, and financial decision-making in health care delivery. He works with major companies on valuation, on how their financial fundamentals drive market valuations, and on how their strategies are linked to climate change. Anant has published in leading journals in finance, law, and organization studies, has authored dozens of cases, is coauthor of The International Business Environment (Prentice-Hall), and served on many editorial boards. He has published op-eds in major global newspapers, and regularly appears in numerous media outlets. He is a founding member of the Foundation for Advancement of Research in Finance, sits on the board of the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, was Faculty Director of the Tuck Environmental Sustainability Forum and a sponsor of the Climate Speaker Series at Tuck, was on the advisory board of The Energy and Resources Institute of India, and was a member of a National Academy of Sciences steering committee on climate education. He created the Fossil Fuel Beta (FFß), a metric to measure the stock price impact of a company’s exposure to fossil fuel price changes for CFO magazine.

 

 

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Carolyn Murray, MD, MPH, Director, Community Outreach and Translation Core (COTC), Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Center at Dartmouth

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Dr. Carolyn Murray leads the Community Outreach and Translation Core of the Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Center at Dartmouth. She is board certified in Public Health/General Preventive Medicine and Occupational Medicine and is currently serving as the Interim Section Chief of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at DHMC. Her research interests are in the human health effects of early life exposure to environmental hazards, and the engagement of health professionals in incorporating environmental health into their clinical practice. She is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, Community and Family Medicine and the Dartmouth Institute at the Geisel School of Medicine. 

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Celia Chen, PhD, Director, Dartmouth Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program at Dartmouth College

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Celia Chen is the Director of the Dartmouth Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program and a Research Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth College. She is also an adjunct scientist and Co-Director of the Center for Mercury Studies of the Biodiversity Research Institute in Portland Maine. She is an aquatic ecologist and her research over the last 23 years has been focused on the fate and effects of toxic metals in aquatic ecosystems including lakes, streams, and estuaries. Most of her current research investigates the global pollutant, mercury, and its bioaccumulation in aquatic food webs in coastal ecosystems where it is taken up by fish, the main vector of exposure for humans and wildlife. Dr. Chen also works to bring mercury science to policy at local, national, and international levels. She represents Dartmouth College on the UN Environment Programme Mercury Fate and Transport Partnership and she has participated in the International Negotiating Conference and the Conference of Parties of the Minamata Convention, the global mercury treaty. She has served on numerous USEPA Science Advisory Board Panels and chaired many mercury workshops, in addition to co-chairing the 2017 International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant, a meeting of >1000 mercury scientists from around the world.

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Ross Virginia, PhD, Director of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College

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Ross Virginia, the Myers Family Professor at Dartmouth College is an ecosystem ecologist and member of the Environmental Studies Programfaculty.  He studies how rapid environmental change in the polar regions affects ecosystems and society.  His current research examines how climate change alters carbon cycling in the dry valleys of Antarctica and in the tundra ecosystems of western Greenland. He is active in Arctic policy and global environmental issues as director of Dartmouth's Institute of Arctic Studies. As distinguished co-lead scholar for the US State Department Fulbright Arctic Initiativehe is charged with bringing together teams of researchers from the eight Arctic nations to focus on science and policy challenges impacting the sustainability and resilience of Arctic communities.

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Anne Sosin, MPH, Global Health Initiative Program Director at The Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College

 

Anne Sosin is a public health professional with experience in human rights and international development. For more than ten years, she has designed and led partnerships to advance global health equity in a range of low and middle income settings. Anne currently serves as the Program Director for the the Global Health Initiative at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.

Anne began her career as a human rights worker in Haiti, where she helped to establish community-based programs for women survivors of sexual violence. In Rwanda, she led district and national health partnerships to support reconstruction of the country’s health system. Anne has written and spoken widely about health and human rights and was a featured speaker at the 2018 TEDx Dartmouth.

Anne holds a BA from Dartmouth College and a MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Jonathan Winter, PhD, Assistant Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College

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Jonathan Winter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College.  Jonathan’s research broadly explores climate prediction and the impacts of climate variability and change on human health, water resources, and agriculture. Jonathan’s current projects include analyzing drivers of Lyme disease expansion; examining future water availability for irrigation and its potential effects on crop yields in the American Midwest; development of high-resolution, application-specific climate projections using global and regional climate models; and evaluating causes and predictability of climate extremes (droughts, floods, heat waves) for the Northeastern United States.

 

Before moving to the Upper Valley in the summer of 2013, Jonathan was an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University Earth Institute and a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.  Jonathan received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed his undergraduate studies at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, NY.

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Patricia Lopez, PhD, Assistant Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College

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Patricia Lopez is an historical health and human geographer whose research and teaching emerges from two central questions: How do we come to care (for and about others, near and far) and in what ways? and How are lives valued differently and what impacts do these have on livability? From here, she focuses on individuals and communities, both historically and contemporarily, that have been marginalized and racialized in moments and sites of ‘benevolence’ (care). With this sharp focus, geographical questions emerge about how presumably universal ethics that frame social, political, and economic relations within and between countries and populations are (or are not) actually enacted. Through this lens, she has published on historical militarized humanitarianisms, care ethical engagements in health and medicine, and affective engagements in research. She is currently working on a project titled Monstrous Microbes which examines the emergence of disease and outbreak narratives as projects of a spatialized race-making project during the spread of settler colonialism in ways that continue to inform racialized fears about disease mobility in the present.

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Peter Wright, MD, Professor of Pediatrics at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

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Dr. Wright is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine based in the Division of Infectious Disease and International Health.  He spent several months at the end of his clinical training in rural Haiti and has continued to work and do research in the country ever since. In collaboration with a research institute in Port-au-Prince (GHESKIO) he has initiated clinical trials of HIV vaccines, defined parameters of HIV mother-to-child transmission, assisted with HPV trial design, and assisted in a vaccine response to cholera. At the request of the Haitian government he has helped design a trauma system for Haiti and is currently working on a neonatal intensive care unit for Southern Haiti.

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Gabe Zoerheide, Executive Director of Willing Hands

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Gabe Zoerheide, a ninth generation Upper Valley resident, has spent his career at the intersection of charitable organizations and food. From working at Vital Communities’ Valley Food and Farm program to running his family’s diversified livestock farm, Gabe understands how food and agriculture can improve communities. For the last 3 years Gabe has been the Executive Director of Willing Hands, overseeing growth in the organization’s budget and a 30% increase in food donated. 

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Laurie J. Beyranevand, JD, Director at Center for Agriculture and Food System and Professor of Law at Vermont Law School

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Laurie J. Beyranevand is the Director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and a Professor of Law at Vermont Law School. In addition to teaching, she has directed several major grant funded projects for the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems.

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Professor Beyranevand received a BA from Rutgers College in 1999 and a JD from Vermont Law School in 2003. She clerked in the Environmental Division of the Vermont Attorney General's Office and also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Marie E. Lihotz in New Jersey. Prior to joining the faculty at Vermont Law School, Professor Beyranevand was a Staff Attorney at Vermont Legal Aid where she represented adults and children in individual cases and class action litigation involving health law issues. In that capacity, she appeared in state and federal court, as well as before administrative adjudicative bodies, and served as an appointed member of the Human Rights Committee.

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Professor Beyranevand has published a number of scholarly articles and book chapters that focus on the connections between human health. the environment, and the food system. Her work has been cited in petitions to major federal agencies, books, blogs, and articles, and she has been quoted in Politico, Mother Jones, the Christian Science Monitor, Climate Wire, and E & E Greenwire among others.

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She is an appointed member of the Editorial Advisory Board to the Food and Drug Law Institute, a member of the Conference Committee of the Academy of Food Law and Policy, and the Chair Elect to the Agriculture and Food Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools. She is admitted to the New York and Vermont State Bars, as well as the U.S. District Court, District of Vermont.

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Daniel Lucey, MD, MPH, Senior Scholar, O’Neill Institute

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Daniel Lucey is an infectious disease-public health physician who graduated from Dartmouth College in 1977 and received his MD there in 1982. He completed his medical residency at UCSF (1982-85), then ID Fellowship (1985-1988) and MPH at Harvard. He served as an ID Attending Physician at the NIH Clinical Center (1995-1998). He has worked on the frontlines of emerging viral pan-epidemics starting with AIDS in San Francisco 1982-85, avian influenza since 2004 in China, Indonesia, and Egypt, then Zika in Brazil, Yellow Fever in DRCongo and Chikungunya in Pakistan in 2016, and plague in Madagascar 2017.   In 2014 he provided hands-on care for over 200 patients with Ebola in Freetown, Sierra Leone and in Liberia (in Monrovia with Doctors-Without-Borders).

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August 7, 2014 he proposed an Exhibit on virus epidemics, from the perspective of the “One Health” triad of human, animal, and environmental health, to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in DC. The Exhibit is open May 2018 until May 2021. A Do-It-Yourself (DIY), customizable download-on-demand version has been translated into 5 languages and shown in over 20 locations in the USA and overseas.  He has taught and written about epidemics for the past 17 years at Georgetown University, and is a proponent of One Health and Planetary Health.

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