Upcoming Seminar: Public Health Impacts of Climate Change in India
The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future will host a seminar titled “Public Health Impacts of Climate Change in India” on Wednesday, April 6 from 12:00 to 1:30 pm at The Pardee Center, 67 Bay State Road.
Prof. Sucharita Gopal of the Department of Earth & Environment (E&E) will moderate a discussion featuring Prof. Susan Foster of the School of Public Health and Prof. Bruce Anderson of the Department of Earth & Environment.
The seminar is part of work by Gopal, Anderson, and Foster — along with Prof. Les Kaufman — as Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellows, which explores the connections between climate change and human health impacts in India and Cambodia, hoping to better inform policy decisions in the areas of public health and related fields. Their research examines the connections between climate change and disease and studies monthly temperature extremes in each country over the past 40 years, including an analysis of the frequency and distribution of extreme heat in India over that period.
Speaker Biographies
Sucharita Gopal Sucharita Gopal is Professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences, as well as Research Professor at the Center for Cognitive & Neural Systems and Center for Remote Sensing. Her multidisciplinary research over the last 10 years has dealt with neural network applications in remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) domains, as well as applying spatial analysis to a variety of problems in biology, environmental science, public health, and business. Her current funded research includes examining spatial determinants of insectivorous bat diversity in Malaysia, and multi-scale models in remote sensing and GIS.
Gopal teaches courses on world regional geography, spatial analysis and GIS, environmental decision making, and economic geography. She co-wrote the Pardee Paper Sub-Saharan Africa at a Crossroads: A Quantitative Analysis of Regional Development, and has published academic papers in such journals as Geographical Analysis, Environment and Planning, Journal of Environmental Psychology, and International Journal of Remote Sensing.
Susan Foster’s research focuses on the economics of infectious disease, particularly antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance, malaria, HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, and TB. She is involved in several research projects, primarily in Africa.
Prof. Foster served in the Peace Corps in Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Cameroon, worked as a Young Professional within the World Bank’s Population, Health and Nutrition Department and was seconded to the World Health Organization’s Essential Drugs Program in Geneva. She then joined the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine as Senior Lecturer in Health Economics, and was course organizer for the master of science program in Public Health in Developing Countries. She was appointed the School’s first Distance Learning Coordinator. She has also done work in Burundi, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Zambia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Madagascar, Indonesia and Malaysia. At the BU School of Public Health, she teaches courses including Pathogens, Poverty and Populations, Seminar on International Health Policy Issues, and Confronting Non-communicable Diseases. She speaks French, Spanish and Portuguese.
Bruce Anderson is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. He is currently working as a Faculty Research Fellow in Residence at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.
In addition, Prof. Anderson actively works with the public sector on issues related to climate variability, including serving as a Research Consultant for the Union of Concerned Scientist’s Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment (NECIA) project, an expert advisor for the Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for Cambridge, MA, and a contributing author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report. He was one of the inaugural Grantham Institute for Climate Change Visiting Fellows at Imperial College for Science, Technology and Medicine and has also been a Royal Society Visiting Scientist, National Research Council Fellow and a NOAA Visiting Scientist Fellow. Prof. Anderson has more than 50 peer-reviewed articles published or in press and has been an invited speaker at both national and international universities, conferences, and workshops. Prof. Anderson is also the lead author (with Prof. Alan Strahler, BU) of an introductory undergraduate textbook on Weather and Climate, published jointly by John Wiley & Sons and the National Geographic Society (2008).
His research interests include regional impacts of climate variability; large-scale and regional atmospheric dynamics and hydrology; historic and future climate trends within observations and climate-simulation models; coupled ocean-atmosphere modes of variability; and climate/vegetation interactions and feedbacks.