How long have you been a part of Yale EMD, and what was your journey to get here?
Colin: I’ve been with the department for about half a year now! I’m coming to Yale by way of Georgetown University, where I had been since 2018, first as a postdoc with the wonderful Dr. Shweta Bansal in the Department of Biology and then as faculty at the Center for Global Health Science & Security with Dr. Rebecca Katz (a YSPH alum!).
What made you decide to apply to be part of Yale EMD faculty?
The word “interdisciplinary” is overused but a good description for this department. EMD is full of people who draw on organismal biology and ecology in their research, so I don’t feel out of place as a disease ecologist who spent a decade drifting into epidemiology. There are also people here who are working on the most applied social, behavioral, and policy-related questions we have in public health, and there’s an incredible ethos oriented around the real-world impact of our work. I think there’s very few epidemiology departments in the world that can say all of that. It’s a really special community!
What advice would you give early career researchers starting out in the field of climate epidemiology and EMD more broadly?
The world is on the cusp of passing the 1.5 degree global warming limit in the Paris Agreement and may not come back down below it in our lifetimes. That means that every epidemiologist is a climate epidemiologist now. So, if you’re excited about climate and health, my advice would be: find the tiny corner of that very, very big space that excites you the most. If you have deep knowledge of your system and can keep current on climate science, you’ll find that it’s very easy to ask big questions about climate change impacts that no one has asked yet.
What do you look for in an MPH or PhD student looking to join your lab?
The #1 thing we’re looking for right now is folks with strong skills on the epidemiology side who are also interested in taking dynamical models or other quantitative methods and applying them to climate-related questions. But our group is pretty diverse - for example, we always have at least one to two people working on law and policy related questions. Take a look at some of the recent work on our lab website and tell us where you would take it next!
What previous work are you most proud of?
The most rewarding things we get to do are consistently policy-facing. For me, the big two have been supporting the sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC [intergovernmental panel on climate change], and then more recently, stepping into the world of pandemic treaty negotiations to help solve problems related to data equity. It’s not always obvious which science we do will be most helpful at these interfaces, so it’s important to go back every couple years and figure out what we should focus on next.
What are you working on at the moment?
It feels like our lab is exploding right now! The thing I’m most excited about is getting back to climate and health after a few pandemic-heavy years – we’re getting to work on some new projects on arboviruses that I’m especially excited about. But there’s a huge mix: we have some work coming soon on graph theory and biodiversity, some ongoing work on plague and rodent reservoirs of zoonoses, and a ton of in-progress work on how science was used in the pandemic treaty negotiations. It’s a big and tangled mess, and that’s how we do our best work.
Where do you see the field of climate epidemiology research heading in the next few years, and what role do you hope your work will play in this future landscape?
The big challenge right now is to go beyond being a passive observer – chronicling the health impacts of climate change as they keep piling up, issuing a slightly more urgent call to action every year – and finding ways to directly feed into climate action. That could look a lot of different ways: lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about how our work provides evidence for litigation and loss and damage, and how strengthening (and reimagining!) health systems could protect the most vulnerable people from both extreme weather and emerging infections. There’s so much more work we need to do if we want to translate science into action.