The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change is an international, multi-disciplinary collaboration that monitors the links between health and climate change through indicators highlighting the threats to health and the solutions. The 2019 Global Report and its companion Policy Brief for the United States were released on November 13, 2019. Dr. Salas and Dr. Patz will discuss how these recent findings present a profound opportunity to improve health and the steps needed to achieve a healthier future for everyone.

Speakers:
Jonathan Patz, MD, MPH
Jonathan Patz is Professor & the John P. Holton Chair of Health and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His faculty appointments are in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Population Health Sciences. He also directs the university’s Global Health Institute. Dr. Patz co-chaired the health report for the first Congressionally mandated US National Assessment on Climate Change and for 15 years, served as a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Some of his other awards include an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellows Award, a shared Zayed International Prize for the Environment, a Fulbright Scholarship, the American Public Health Association’s Homer Calver Award for environmental health leadership, the Chanchlani Global Health Research Award, and he is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Renee N. Salas, MD, MPH, MS
Dr. Salas has served as the lead author for the 2018 and 2019 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change U.S. Brief. She is a Yerby Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Affiliated Faculty at the Harvard Global Health Institute, and faculty in Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She engages in grant-funded research on how climate change is impacting the healthcare system and developing evidence-based adaptation. She has published in high impact journals and lectures on climate and health nationally and internationally. Her Doctor of Medicine is from the innovative five-year medical school program to train physician-investigators at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine with a Master of Science in Clinical Research from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Her Master of Public Health degree is from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with a concentration in environmental health.