How the BSD is building climate awareness into its training and research programs

In recent years, the language has shifted from “global warming” and “climate change” to instead discuss the “climate crisis.” The urgent need to better understand how the rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the accompanying global temperature increase will affect the planet is now being addressed by universities, which are increasingly building climate change into their curricula and research programs.

In 2022, Pritzker School of Medicine students heard from Susan Buchanan, MD, MPH, Director of the Great Lakes Center for Children’s and Reproductive Environmental Health and a Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Ilinois Chicago School of Public Health. During her lecture, she spoke about how a patient’s physical environment can impact their health. Understanding the role of environment in a patient’s history can add further dimension and context to the healthcare needs of an individual, and will become even more critical as these spaces continue to change over time.

replicate better at lower temperatures, so those infections might improve for bats as things get warmer, whereas viruses tend to respond positively to increasing temperatures up to a point.”

Work like Brook’s can help clarify how and why zoonotic diseases persist in animal populations and identify ways to mitigate the risk of interspecies transmission. Perhaps the most obvious solution is simple in theory, but challenging in execution: conservation. “We have found links between physiological stress in the bats, accelerated viral shedding and anthropogenically impacted habitats,” she said. “From a conservation and a public health standpoint, there are win-win opportunities. Healthy bats pose less of a zoonotic threat.”

“Much of our medical training as first- and second-year medical students focuses on biological processes of disease, so being able to learn about the role of place and environment on health from Dr. Buchanan was incredibly valuable,” said Tony Liu, MS2. “It’s important to recognize that all physicians work with patient populations tied to specific locales and histories.”

Concurrently, thanks to a growing awareness of the relationship between climate change and health, the Biological Sciences Division’s Department of Public Health Sciences has been conducting a search for a new faculty member whose research is focused in this area. “There is a complex set of issues that research about climate change and health needs to address, requiring interdisciplinary expertise that spans the physical sciences, social sciences, public health and medicine,” said Diane Lauderdale, PhD, AM’78, AM’81, Chair of the department and Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Public Health Sciences. “We have much more to learn about the ways different manifestations of climate change and extreme weather impact mental and physical well-being, and how we can mitigate those effects.”