Name: Dr Samuel Myers
Institution: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Connection to the Academy: Academy of Medical Sciences and the Lancet International Health Lecture 2017
Where did your interest in planetary health stem from?
I grew up in Boston and felt very connected to nature as a child, hiking in the White Mountains, outdoors on Cape Cod, and camping with my family. As an undergraduate at Harvard I struggled with the choice between medicine and biology because of my dual interests in human health and the workings of the natural world and ultimately decided that they must be connected.
Can you tell us a little about your career so far?
I spent two years managing the Pendeba project in the Qomolangma Nature Reserve in Tibet during the middle of my residency in internal medicine. Pendeba in Standard Tibetan means “worker who benefits the village”; the project trains elected village leaders in the practicalities of environmental protection, primary healthcare and preventative medicine. I subsequently spent four years at USAID and Conservation International continuing to explore links between natural resource management and human health, with a particular focus on low-income settings. After a fellowship in general internal medicine at Harvard, I launched a research career exploring the human health impacts of accelerating human disruption of Earth’s natural systems.
More recently, I have become the Director of the Planetary Health Alliance, a Harvard-based consortium of over 70 universities, NGOs, government entities, research institutes, and other partners around the world committed to advancing planetary health. Through the Alliance, we seek to support efforts to understand and quantify the impact of disrupting Earth’s natural systems on human health, and translate that understanding into advantageous resource-management decisions around the world. My life’s career energy is focused on building awareness that human disruption of Earth’s natural systems is becoming an urgent human health threat, driving an ever larger share of global burden of disease and that humanity needs to chart a new course if it is going to protect the health and wellbeing of future generations.
Are there any key messages that you hope the audience will take away from your lecture?
Dr Sam Myers will be presenting the Academy of Medical Sciences & The Lancet International Health Lecture, “Planetary Health: Protecting Global Health on a Rapidly Changing Planet”, on 13 November 2017. For more information please visit this page.
I hope the audience will come to see that our management of Earth’s natural systems is not an environmental problem but our problem – centrally important to our own health and wellbeing, and particularly important for our children and grandchildren. I hope they will share my belief that we have a very positive future within our grasp, but need to take dedicated collective action to achieve it.
Have there been any major role models or mentors in your career, and do you find yourself mentoring others?
Of course. E.O.Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, was the first one to advise me at Harvard that there might be a synthesis between my two passions of human health and Nature. Numerous natural scientists have patiently helped me learn pieces of their disciplines as they connect to human health. Howie Frumkin [Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington School of Public Health] has been an inspiration not only as a scholar but as a human being. And I serve as a mentor to many students, post-docs, junior faculty members, and staff of the Planetary Health Alliance—whether as a model of what to emulate or what to avoid, you’ll have to ask them.