Dr. Christopher Golden is an Assistant Professor of Planetary Health and Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. As an ecologist and epidemiologist, his research investigates the human health impacts of global environmental change, with a focus on food systems. He received his BA from Harvard College and two graduate degrees from UC Berkeley: an MPH in Epidemiology with a focus in Nutrition, and a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Golden has been conducting research in Madagascar since 1999, and founded the non-profit Madagascar Health and Environmental Research (MAHERY). He has recently begun research in West Africa and the South Pacific. He is a core member of the CBD-WHO task force on biodiversity and health and the co-lead of the Nutrition chapter for the Blue Foods Assessment. His research has been published in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His current research focuses on: 1) the role of climate-smart fisheries management to improve human nutrition; and 2) creating systems of climate-smart public health through climate and environmental monitoring and disease surveillance. 

contact: golden@hsph.harvard.edu 

Dr. Francesca Dominici is the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Co-Director of the Data Science Initiative at Harvard University. She was recruited to the Harvard Chan School as a tenured Professor of Biostatistics in 2009. She was appointed Associate Dean of Information Technology in 2011 and Senior Associate Dean for Research in 2013. In her current role as co-director of the Data Science Initiative, Dr. Dominici is building on the collaborations that already exist across the University to foster a rich and cohesive data science community, bringing together scholars from across disciplines and schools. In addition to carrying out the academic plan of the initiative, she oversees the operations and distribution of seed funding and helps to raise funds to support its key programmatic activities.

contact: fdominic@hsph.harvard.edu 

Oladimeji Mudele is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health mentored by Christopher Golden and Francesca Dominici. His work centers on the application of geospatial information and data science methods for connecting climate and health outcomes/policy. He holds an M.Sc in Electronic Engineering (summa cum laude) and a Ph.D. in Electronic, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (2021) from the University of Pavia (UNIPV), Italy. Before that, he had obtained a B.Eng (Hons.) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. During his Ph.D., he was a beneficiary of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions and the German Academic Exchange Service scholarships. Between 2018 and 2019, he was a visiting scholar at the Argentinean Commission for Space Activities and the Institute of Computing of the Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil. In 2019, he received the “Premio di Laurea” award as the top international scholar in UNIPV.

contact: omudele@hsph.harvard.edu 

Giacomo De Nicola is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, under the joint mentorship of Christopher Golden and Francesca Dominici. His research broadly seeks to design, implement and leverage modern statistical tools to address real-world problems, with a focus on applications in public health and the social sciences. His current postdoc research is part of the Climate-Smart Public Health project, where he aims at understanding and measuring the impact of climate and climate change on health outcomes in low-income settings. Giacomo holds a PhD in Statistics from LMU Munich, an MSc in Economic and Social Sciences from Bocconi University, and a BSc in Statistics from the University of Florence, where he received the best student award for graduating top of his class. His research on assessing excess mortality during crises earned him a special award from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany.

contact: gdenicola@hsph.harvard.edu 

Christian is a PhD Student in Biostatistics focused on applications of causal inference to problems in infectious disease, especially with an eye towards causal inference in observational settings that warrant consideration of spillover effects and other spatiotemporal complexities. He is especially interested in causal inference and estimation strategies that use machine learning or ensemble learners to mitigate the risks of model misspecification. With Chris Golden’s lab, Christian is currently working on quantifying the causal effects of deforestation on malaria incidence rates in Madagascar subject to effect heterogeneity due to ecological zone dynamics under the Climate-Smart Public Health project.

contact: ctesta@hsph.harvard.edu 

Olivia Turner is a PhD student in Population Health Sciences studying environmental health with a focus on climate and sustainability. Her research interests are in leveraging data science and non-traditional data sources to assess the health effects of climate change and strategies for mitigation and adaptation. In 2023, Olivia graduated from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a Masters of Public Health. During this program, she completed a capstone project evaluating the opportunities for seaweed to benefit human and environmental health. Olivia worked as a software engineer and data scientist at Mathematica, analyzing data, building reporting systems, developing data pipelines, and creating interactive data visualizations for a variety of health projects in collaboration with federal agencies.

contact: oliviaturner@fas.harvard.edu 

Tinashe is a Research Software Engineer on the Climate-Smart Public Health data science team with a diverse background spanning neuroimaging, psychology, people analytics, and oncology data science. From 2018 to 2022, he worked at the Penn Lifespan Informatics and Neuroimaging Center, developing robust, scalable data preprocessing pipelines using Python, R, bash, and Docker. He holds an Accelerated BSMS in Psychology from Drexel University, where he completed a Master’s thesis on advanced data mining models under the mentorship of Fengqing Zhang. Tinashe has industry experience applying NLP and text mining techniques at Salesforce and building pharmacovigilance dashboards for cancer treatment exposure at ConcertAI. Passionate about research software engineering, he mentors in the Data Science Learning Community and writes regularly for the US Research Software Engineers Association (US-RSE). He is currently pursuing a Master’s in Health Informatics at Northeastern University. Outside of work, he enjoys jumping rope and playing Apex Legends with his wife and brother.

contact: ttapera@hsph.harvard.edu 

Marissa Childs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington. Her research explores how large-scale environmental changes — like climate change and land use change — affect human health. Her work uses remote sensing and modeling to quantify nonlinear and context-dependent effects of environmental change. In particular, some of her past and ongoing work has focused on predicting yellow fever virus spillover in Brazil, projecting changes in dengue incidence from climate warming, producing granular estimates of wildfire smoke exposure throughout the contiguous US, and understanding climate-sensitive diseases in Madagascar.

contact: mlchilds@uw.edu 

I am an environmental epidemiologist and physicist whose quantitative research is focused on climate change, public health and equity. I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and an NIH NIEHS K99/R00 Fellow. I teach Atmospheric and Climate Science for Public Health at Columbia University. I am also the Lead Instructor of the Columbia University SHARP Course Bayesian Modeling for Environmental Health. I supervise several post-doctoral fellows, PhD students, and Master's students. I was a Columbia University Earth Institute/Climate School Post-doctoral Fellow from 2019 to 2022 with Prof. Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, completed my PhD at the School of Public Health at Imperial College London with Profs. Majid Ezzati and Ralf Toumi in 2019, and graduated with a BA/MA (Oxon) in physics from the University of Oxford. I am proudly both a first-gen academic and an Agents of Change in Environmental Justice Senior Fellow.

contact: robbie.parks@columbia.edu 

Daniel Arias is a graduate of the Population Health Sciences PhD program in the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he studied within the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. An affiliate of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Daniel’s research focused on global mental health, econometrics, and data science. Daniel also worked as a research consultant for the World Bank’s Health, Nutrition, and Population Global Practice, providing technical support on health system strengthening and disease response programs. Prior to joining Harvard, Daniel received a Master of Public Health degree in 2019 from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where his studies were supported by a Sommer Scholarship. He further holds a BA in history of science, medicine, and public health from Yale University, where he graduated with Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude honors.