Helen Nguyen, Editor in Chief

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL, USA
[email protected]

Dr. Helen Nguyen is a professor of environmental engineering, a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Genomic Biology and Carle Illinois College of Medicine at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since joining Illinois, she has established an internationally recognized research program focusing on various topics related to pathogen transmission and control to protect public health. She has led research projects with worldwide impacts, as evidenced in the United States, Vietnam, Nepal, Uganda, Japan, China, and Israel. For example, she has published several studies on microbial contamination and human exposure in Nepal after the devastating earthquake of 2015. A Fulbright fellowship to Israel led her to establish a project funded by both USDA and Israel on water reuse in hydroponics and aquaponics facilities in both countries. This project was selected as an impact feature by USDA. Her research has been published in more than 120 peer-reviewed articles in top-tier environmental engineering and science journals and presented at top research universities worldwide.

Rita Colwell, Founding Editor*

University of Maryland
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
3103 Biomolecular Sciences Building
College Park, MD 20742
United States

http://research.umd.edu/capabilities/faculty/colwell

Dr. Rita Colwell is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland at College Park and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Founder of CosmosID, Inc. Her interests are focused on global infectious diseases, water, and health. She has authored or co-authored 20 books and more than 800 scientific publications. Dr. Colwell served as 11th Director of the National Science Foundation and Co-chair of the Committee on Science, National Science and Technology Council. Dr. Colwell served as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Microbiology, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington Academy of Sciences, and American Society for Microbiology, Sigma Xi National Science Honorary Society, International Union of Microbiological Societies, and American Institute of Biological Sciences. Dr. Colwell is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Royal Society of Canada, and Royal Irish Academy, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society.

Assaf Anyamba

Oakridge National Laboratory
United States Email: [email protected]
Expertise: Remote Sensing of Vegetation, Climate Variability, ENSO, Vectorborne Diseases, Agricultural Monitoring, Early Warning Systems

Dr. Assaf Anyamba is a Distinguished R&D Staff Member and Group Lead, Remote Sensing, Geographic Data Science Section in the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division, National Security Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His research is on understand the land surface response to climate variability primarily through satellite derived vegetation  index time series measurements and application of various satellite climate measurements to study ecologically coupled diseases and agricultural monitoring. His research and applications have supported operational programs of various federal government agencies including the Department of Defense - Global Emerging Infections Surveillance, the United States Department of Agriculture - Foreign Agricultural Service and Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Food and Drug Administration among others. He has been involved in various cross-cutting forums including National Academy of Sciences/ National Academy of Medicine (NAM): Vector-borne Diseases, Human Health and Climate Change, The Brookings Institution and The Rockefeller Foundation 17 Rooms Initiative on Transforming National and Global Epidemic Intelligence Systems, World Organization for Animal Health/ Office International des Epizooties (WAOH), World Health Organization (WHO) - Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) on Rift Valley fever, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) - Emergency Prevention System  for Transboundary Animal and Plant Pests and Diseases (EMPRES) among others. In addition, his work has been featured in various media outlets including National Public Radio (NPR) – Morning Edition, Science Friday, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – Science in Action, Voice of America (VoA2q  ), in print and in the Netflix, Documentary Connected: Clouds, The Hidden Science of Everything. He has over 80 peer reviewed publications in various interdisciplinary journals.

Dr. Anyamba received his Ph.D. in Geography from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.  He has a MA from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio and BA in Geography and Economics from Kenyatta University, Kenya.

Kai Chen

Yale University
United States Email: [email protected]
Expertise: Climate change, Epidemiology, Temperature, Air pollution, Extreme weather events

Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Engineering in 2016 from Nanjing University in China. During 2014-2015, he served as a Visiting Scholar at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Prior to joining the Yale School of Public Health faculty in July 2019, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoc Fellow at Helmholtz Zentrum München-German Center for Environmental Health. Dr. Chen’s research focuses on the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health. His work involves applying multidisciplinary approaches in climate and air pollution sciences, exposure assessment, and environmental epidemiology to investigate how climate change may impact human health. Much of this work has been done in China, Europe, and the U.S.

Sagnik Dey

Indian Institute of Technology
Research Executive Agency
India

Prof. Sagnik Dey is Institute Chair Professor at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, IIT Delhi. He received his M. Sc. in Applied Geoscience from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and M. Tech. and PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. He worked as Postdoctoral Scientist at Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA for three years before joining IIT Delhi. His research interests are to understand 'air quality, climate change and health nexus' and 'remote sensing of the Earth's climate system'. He has published more than 130 peer-reviewed research articles (h-index - 45 as per google scholar). He received INSA Young Scientist Medal in 2008, NASI-SCOPUS Young Scientist Award in 2012, Dr. Sudhansu Kumar Banerji MoES outstanding young faculty fellowship for the period 2011-2013, and Teaching Excellence Award from IIT Delhi in 2016. He is an international collaborator of NASA's MAIA satellite mission and served as an expert member of WHO Global Platform on Air Quality and Health. He is a collaborator of the Global Burden of Disease Study. Prof. Dey has been awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professsional Excellence Fellowship for 2017-18. Prof. Dey is the coordinator of Centre of Excellence for Research on Clean Air (CERCA), IIT Delhi. He is an Associate Faculty of School of Public Policy and Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre (TRIPC), IIT Delhi. He is a member of WHO Southeast Asia non-communicable diseases Regional Technical Advisory group and co-convener of CAPHER-India network. He is serving as Deputy Editor of the Journal of Health and Pollution (NIH journal), Associate Editor of Atmospheric Environment (Elsevier journal) and of Heliyon (Cell press), and Editorial board member of GeoHealth (AGU journal), Scientific Reports (Nature journal) and Earth System Dynamics (EGU journal). He is serving as a member of the scientific advisory committee of the ICMR National Institute for Research in Environmental Health, Bhopal and the National Institute of Occupational Health, Ahmedabad and of the Academic COunil of TERI School of Advanced Studies.

Meredith Franklin

University of Toronto
Canada
Email: [email protected]

Meredith Franklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. Trained in mathematics, statistics, and environmental health, her interdisciplinary research focuses on quantifying environmental exposures through spatiotemporal statistical and machine learning approaches to assess their impacts on health outcomes. She has been a leader in developing methods to use remote sensing data for exposure assessment for a variety of environmental factors including air pollution, wildfires, flaring from oil and gas, artificial light at night, and greenspace. She has also conducted several highly cited population-based epidemiological studies of the association between air pollution and health. She received a B.Sc. from McGill University and a Ph.D. from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Tzung-May Fu

Southern University of Science and Technology
China
Email: [email protected]

Dr Fu received her PhD in atmospheric chemistry from Harvard University in 2007. She is a currently a professor at the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology. Her research interests involve air pollution and the interactions between atmospheric chemistry and weather/climate. Recent research topics include inverse modeling of the emissions of non-methane volatile organic compounds and organic aerosols using satellite and ground-based measurements, sources of PM2.5 and ozone pollution in China, formation pathways of secondary organic aerosols, air quality in future climate, cloud-aerosol interactions, and development of chemistry-meteorology models.

Sunny Jiang

Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine
Irvine, CA
United States

Dr. Sunny Jiang is a professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Irvine, where she also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and serves as a graduate faculty in the Environmental Health Science program in the School of Public Health. Dr. Jiang earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Marine Science from the University of South Florida, and her research interests include microbiological water quality, quantitative microbial risk assessment modeling, engineered and natural water treatment technologies. Dr. Jiang is a leader in promoting diversity and equal opportunities in STEM and has actively worked towards this goal during her time as the Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Jiang has served on the U.S. National Academies’ Water Reuse committee to guide the nation on water reuse practices and the WHO’s Committee for Desalination to draft desalination guidelines for the world.

Yang Liu

Rollins School of Public Health
Atlanta, GA
United States

Yang Liu received his PhD in environmental science and engineering from Harvard University in 2004. He is the Gangarosa Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University. His research interests include satellite aerosol retrieval and product design, applications of satellite remote sensing in public health research, climate change and health, machine learning and spatial statistics. Over the past 15 years, Dr. Liu has applied various satellite data products in modeling population exposure to various environmental stressors such as air pollution, extreme heat, wildland fires, and UV radiation, as well as their associated adverse health outcomes including cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and mental health issues. He is a science team member of the NASA EVI-3 MAIA investigation and the Terra MISR mission, and a PI member of the NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Science Team (2011-present).

Adina Paytan

UC Santa cruz
United States

Dr. Paytan was born and raised in Israel, and after two years of mandatory military service, traveled to India and Nepal and hiked the Himalayas for another two years.  She obtained her B.S. double major in Biology and Geology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Realizing the importance of science education to society, Dr. Payatn pursued a M.S. degree in science education at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.  She developed a curriculum in field geology for high school students, which was implemented successfully, and then pursued another M.S. degree, this time in oceanography, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her thesis was on oxygen isotope exchange between water and phosphate via biological cycling. In 1989, Dr. Paytan moved to San Diego to take part in the Ph.D. program at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Her thesis was on marine barite as a recorder of oceanic chemistry, productivity, and circulation. She stayed in San Diego (UCSD) for a post doc, this time producing a high resolution sea water S isotope curve for the past 120 Ma. In the summer of 1999, Dr. Paytan moved to Stanford, where she worked for eight years as a professor in the department of Geological and Environmental Sciences. Currently she is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz and is affiliated with the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Ocean Sciences.

Moiz Usmani

University of Florida, USA
Email: [email protected]
Expertise: infectious diseases forecasting, remote sensing

Dr. Moiz Usmani joined the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering in Fall 2024, specializing in environmental health, epidemiology, and the impacts of climate change on public health. His research focuses on the intersections of environmental science and public health, particularly in understanding how environmental factors influence the spread of infectious diseases. Dr. Usmani has published several peer-reviewed articles and contributed to interdisciplinary projects aimed at improving predictive models for public health risks. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering Science and is actively engaged in collaborative research efforts to address global health challenges.

Steve Hung-Lam Yim

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Email: [email protected]

Dr Yim is an Associate Professor of the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. By training, he is an atmospheric scientist and a modeler. To develop a sustainable environment, his research devotes to improve the knowledge of climate change and air quality, and the influences on human health and planetary health. Besides research, he strives to contribute to various government committees and professional associations, aiming at transferring his developed knowledge through research to the society. He serves as the member of the Global Air Pollution and Health - Technical Advisory Group (GAPH-TAG) of the World Health Organization (WHO), and also serves as the invited committee member of the National Advisory Board on Atmospheric Science Discipline in Higher Education, the Ministry of Education of China. Additionally, He contributes to the editorial boards of international peer-review journals, including Scientific Reports (Nature) and Atmosphere.