Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Harvard College, Cambridge, MA	BA	06/2005	Environmental Conservation
UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA	MPH	05/2010	Epidemiology
UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA	PhD	05/2011	Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Harvard University Center for the Environment, Cambridge, MA	Post-doc	06/2013	Planetary Health

I am an ecologist and epidemiologist interested in the interface of ecosystem service provisioning and human health, specifically in the context of global trends in biodiversity loss and ecosystem transformation. Since 1999, I have been conducting ecological and public health research in Madagascar. Most broadly, I am interested in local people’s dependence on natural resources for obtaining adequate health. This interest has led to various studies into connections between marine and terrestrial wildlife consumption and the incidence of micronutrient deficiencies, the importance of botanical ethnomedicines and geophagy to local health, and the eco-epidemiology of malaria and the human microbiome given current trends in biodiversity loss and land use change. Beyond Madagascar, I have been leading a collaborative research program that evaluates the connections among climate change, fisheries management and ocean governance, and food security and human nutrition in coastal populations around the world. Given trends in mass fisheries declines, coral bleaching, and raising sea surface temperatures that will drive fisheries away from the Equator and toward the Poles, food-insecure populations across the globe will be deprived of a critical nutritional resource. Our group tackles this subject by modeling potential health futures and determining what types of interventions may be able to buffer against these impacts.

• planetary health
• Undernutrition
• Malaria
• Microbiome
• Zoonoses
• Africa
• Africa, Sub-Saharan
• Micronutrients
• Madagascar
• Pacific Islands
• Seafood
• Climate Change
• Fatty Acids, Omega-3
• Iron-Deficiency Anemia