April: Healthy Oceans and Healthy Diets
Dr. Christopher Golden
Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Planetary Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
“I am an ecologist and epidemiologist interested in the human health impacts of environmental change, specifically in the context of global trends in biodiversity loss, climate change, and ecosystem transformation. Please visit my research projects webpage or follow me @professor_golden on Instagram to find out what my group and I are working on.
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.”