Faculty Directors
Kyle Denison Martin, DO, MPH
Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, Clinician Educator
Bio Med Medical Education
kyle_martin@brown.edu
Kate Smith, PhD
Senior Associate Dean of Biology Education, Associate Professor of Medical Science
Bio Med Medical Affairs
katherine_smith@brown.edu
Overview
As the Anthropocene brings more change to the earth’s natural systems, physicians across the world need broad, interdisciplinary training to care for their patients who will be increasingly affected. The environment is being altered by pollution, land-use changes, the introduction of invasive species, ocean acidification, warming, desertification, and sea-level rise. Physicians need to be prepared for a wide range of new issues, from waterborne diseases after extreme storm events to cardiorespiratory illness associated with wildfires. Environmental changes will hit the most vulnerable populations, such as the homeless, the elderly, and the very young, the hardest. Future physicians will need to identify populations at risk of the health effects of ecosystem change and develop interventions to mitigate these harms.
Planetary health seeks to understand and act on the human-caused disruptions of Earth’s natural systems that harm human health and well-being. Medical schools are well-positioned agents of change as ‘clinicians are consistently ranked as some of the most trusted sources of information, and they have a unique capacity to understand and communicate the shifting landscape of planetary health challenges and the strategies that individuals can take to simultaneously safeguard their health and that of the environment (Guzman et al 2021 Lancet)’.
The scholarly concentration in planetary health allows students with deeper interest in the field to go beyond these overarching objectives and pursue interdisciplinary inquiry-based learning in the field. Graduates of the planetary health concentration will be positioned for leadership roles at the health-environment intersection as they move through residency and beyond.
Concentrators will partner with faculty from across Brown’s campus to pursue scholarly projects that address a challenge or question relevant to the field. Planetary health is a vast and interdisciplinary field and so we expect our concentrators will pursue a range of projects, including community engagement, advocacy, education/curriculum development, and traditional research. Examples of potential projects include developing strategies to reduce waste in the Rhode Island health care system, identifying and mitigating health effects resulting from sea level rise in the Ocean State, k-12 curriculum contributions on health and the environment, and data science research that models infectious disease spread with climate warming. Students will identify 1-2 scholarly concentration faculty mentors to develop a project that is inquiry based, guided by specific aims, and which culminates in formal dissemination to the Brown community and to other audiences of choice. Over time we anticipate the concentration will attract a breadth of potential faculty mentors. In the short-term, the following individuals are campus-based experts in fields aligned with environment and health who are already committed to considering requests for mentoring from prospective concentrators.
To learn more about Planetary Health in the Division of Biology and Medicine visit https://planetary-health.brown.edu/