IAEH Major Award Recipients
Outstanding Contributions to Ecohealth Award
2016 Valerie Brown
2014 Fang Jing
2012 Pascale Valentin Houneou
2010 David Waltner-Toews
Exceptional Early Career Award
2016 Jonathan Kingsley & Hung Nguyen-Viet
2014 Micah Hahn
2012 Maya Gislason
2010 Melanie Lemire & Katherine Smith
Outstanding Contributions to Ecohealth
2014 Fang Jing
Jing Fang earned her PhD at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex University, UK in 2006. Before that, she was the Deputy Director of Yunnan Reproductive Health Research Association (YRHRA), a NGO based in Yunnan China, and had undertaken research on Chinese rural health care services, particularly women’s reproductive health in poor rural China for more than one decade. She also involved in providing technical support for Quality of Care Project of the National Family Planning Commission and the Improving Reproductive Health Project of the Ministry of Health, China as well as HIV/AIDS prevention project of Yunnan Province. In the last decade, she focused on her study on the governance and accountability of Chinese health system. During 2006-2009 she worked at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an independent intergovernmental organization based on Kathmandu, Nepal, as an EcoHealth specialist and led a project entitled “land use change and human health in eastern Himalaya: an adaptive ecosystem approach”. From 2012 onward, she joined a few other experts in Southeast Asia countries to work on a multi-country and multi-component EcoHealth program entitled “Field Building Leadership Initiative—advancing EcoHealth in Southeast Asia” At present she is a professor and the director of the Institute for Health Sciences, Kunming Medical University doing both teaching and research. She started the first EcoHealth course in the medical university in 2009. She is a member of the Gender and Health Equity Network (GHEN), an international group consisting researchers, governmental officials and practitioners in India, UK, US, China, Sweden, Mozambique and WHO; she was also a member of the Gender and Rights Advisory Panel (GAP), WHO from 2010-2013; a member of executive editorial group of the journal EcoHealth; a member of advisory committee of the Forum for Health, Environment and Development (Forhead), China and a member of the EcoHealth Emerging Infectious Diseases Advisory Committee of IDRC.
2012 Pascale Valentin Houenou
Pascal Valentin Houenou has about 39 years of teaching and research experience, of which 32 mainly as Professor of Inorganic and Environmental Chemistry at University of Cocody and the University of Abobo-Adjamé (Côte d’Ivoire), and head of the Environmental Sciences Laboratory. He has been the Secretary-General and Chairman of the Scientific and Pedagogic Council of the Faculty of Science and Techniques of the University of Cocody (1984-1992), advisor to the President of the University of Abobo-Adjame, responsible for international cooperation (from 1992 to 2002), and founder Dean of the UFR des Sciences et Gestion de l’Environnement at the same university (1996 to 2002). Since 1999 he is the acting Director of the Institute of Renewable Energy. In addition, Pascal Houenou is Regional Advisor at the IDRC West Africa Office, a trainer on EcoHealth (Ecosystem approach to Human Health) and former Coordinator of the field Research Project on “Improving Human Health and those of the Ecosystems in the Buyo Region, South East of Côte d’Ivoire (1996-2004)”. Besides being a Member of various committees and scientific bodies, Pascal Houenou has been consultant for various organizations (ADB, ECA, the World Bank, Association of the African Universities,UNESCO, and REDDA). Since Mai 1st 2005, He has been appointed coordinator and member of the Board of Directors of the Network for sustainable development of Africa (NESDA) hosted by the African Development Bank, in charge of Partnership for MESA (Mainstreaming Environment and sustainability in African universities) for francophone African universities.
2010 David Waltner-Toews
David Waltner-Toews is Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph in the Department of Population Medicine. He was the founding president of Veterinarians without Borders/ Vétérinaires sans Frontières – Canada (www.vwb-vsf.ca), and of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health (www.nesh.ca). He was also a founding member of the Community of Practice for Ecosystem Approaches to Health in Canada (www.copeh-canada.org). Waltner-Toews’ areas of expertise are the epidemiology of food and waterborne diseases, zoonoses (diseases other animals share with people), global change and emerging diseases, One Health, and ecosystem approaches to health. He has collaborated on research and teaching in Africa, Asia and Latin America. His texts include “Ecosystem Sustainability and Health: a practical approach” (Cambridge University Press, 2004), “The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability” (edited, with Nina-Marie Lister and the late James Kay, Columbia University Press, 2008), and “Integrated Assessment of Health and Sustainability of Agroecosytems” (with Thomas Gitau and Margaret Gitau), Taylor and Francis/CRC Press, 2008. Besides being an author on about 100 peer-reviewed scholarly papers, he has published half a dozen books of poetry, a collection of recipes and dramatic monologues (The Complete Tante Tina), an award-winning collection of short stories (One Foot in Heaven), a murder mystery (“Fear of Landing”), three books of popular science, including a natural and cultural history of zoonoses, (The Chickens Fight Back, 2007), and one on the ecological and cultural context for foodborne diseases, (Food, Sex and Salmonella, 2008). His acceptance speech for the IAEH Award was in the form of a poem, The Task of Being Human, which can be found here.
Exceptional Early Career Award
2016 Jonathan Kingsley
Dr Kingsley is a Lecturer in Health Communication (Swinburne University of Technology) and Honorary Fellow in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health (The University of Melbourne). Dr Kingsley has dedicated the better part of the past decade working in Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations, government bodies, academic institutes and NGO’s across Australia in the public health and community development field. Jonathan sees our natural environment as central to health and having the capacity to bridge health inequalities (the basis of his Honours, Masters, PhD and previous Visiting Academic position at Cambridge University). Jonathan views himself as not only an academic but also an activist publishing many journal articles, lecturing and tutoring, having experience in program management in the government, community and NGO sector, reviewing peer-reviewed journals, winning environment awards and sitting on multiple steering committees related to Indigenous and environmental health. Having worked with culturally diverse Aboriginal communities for over 13 years, and, as a non-Indigenous person, Jonathan always attempts to listen to others to understand different worldviews, identify barriers and resolve issues in a respectful manner to cultivate trust and cooperation.
2016 Hung Nguyen-Viet
Hung Nguyen-Viet is a Vietnamese national and holds a PhD in Life and Environmental Sciences (2005) from France. His research focuses on the link between health and agriculture, food safety, infectious and zoonotic diseases, with an emphasis on the use of integrative approaches (One Health and Ecohealth). He co-founded and led the Center for Public Health and Ecosystem Research (CENPHER) at the Hanoi University of Public Health (HUPH) in Vietnam until 2013. Here, he coordinated the regional program “Ecohealth Field Building Leadership Initiative in Southeast Asia” from 2012-2016, and currently holds an honorary professor position since 2016. At present, he is the acting regional representative for East and Southeast Asia and senior scientist in food safety and Ecohealth at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). Prior to HUPH and ILRI, Hung did his postdoc with Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) and Sandec/Eawag in Switzerland (2007-2009) and was a joint scientist at Swiss TPH, ILRI and HUPH (2009-2015). He has published +80 peer-reviewed papers (45 international papers) plus several policy briefs, books and films.
His acceptance speech for the IAEH Award can be found here.
2014 Micah Hahn
Micah Hahn is currently a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Centers for Disease Control, Division of Vector-borne Diseases in Fort Collins, CO and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. Her current work focuses on predicting West Nile virus outbreaks using climate data. In addition, Micah is also an adjunct faculty at Colorado State University where she teaches a course on the influence of global environmental change on emerging infectious diseases. Micah received her joint PhD in Epidemiology / Environment and Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she assessed the impact of land use and forest composition on the disease ecology of Nipah virus in Bangladesh and malaria in the Brazilian Amazon. She completed her MPH at Emory University where her research focused on designing a method for quantifying climate change vulnerability at the district level in Mozambique. Micah served as the Student Representative to the board for IAEH for 4 years and currently serves on the IAEH Development Committee and the International Advisory Committee for the Kunming and Montreal conferences.
2012 Maya Gislason
Maya Gislason is an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University and is an Associate Researcher in the Centre for Global Health Policy at the University of Sussex in the UK. Maya is a medical sociologist who is recognised for her international and transdisciplinary efforts to bring the ecosystems approach to social epidemiological research both within the contexts of Medical Sociology and Public Health. Maya recently edited a book for Emerald’s Advances in Medical Sociology Series titled ‘Ecological Health: Society, Ecology and Health’ in which she has sought to bring critical social theory to ecohealth research and to strengthen medical sociological engagement with ecological health issues. In 2012 Maya completed a D.Phil in Sociology in the Department of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex which was generously funded by the Commonwealth Scholarship in the United Kingdom and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Titled, “Health and the Environment: A Critical Enquiry of the Construction and Contestation of Ecological Health,” Maya’s doctoral thesis argued that a crucial contemporary public health issue is the construction and contestation of the relevance of the natural environment to human health. More generally, Maya writes and speaks about Ecological Health and Sociology in a variety of academic milieu as well as has been a guest lecturer and associate tutor for Sociology at the University of Sussex and the University of Victoria. Maya graduated as a scholarship student with a M.A. in Sociology (2006) and a B.A. with a double major in Sociology and Women’s Studies (2002) both from the University of Victoria. Prior to this, she collaboratively founded, managed and served as a community educator for the Wheels of Change Non-Profit Educational Society (1992-2002), running programs in North and Central America. Maya has also held the title of Co-Principle Investigator for the Arts Ability Research Project (2003-2004) and has served as a research manager and lead researcher on a variety of investigative initiatives ranging from narrative and archival research through to participatory action research and mixed methods qualitative and quantitative research projects.
2010 Melanie Lemire
Mélanie Lemire is an Assistant Professor at Laval University. She has extensive training and experience in EcoHealth and has demonstrated her contribution to this field through her publications, teaching experiences, community-based interventions and coordination of several events for the discussion and the promotion of these research approaches. Through her research and teaching activities, she has unique experience in communication skills, notably in collaborative and interdisciplinary research and in knowledge translation to communities in rural contexts and to other stakeholders, such as local authorities and NGOs, and this, in several languages including French, English, Portuguese and Spanish. Her doctoral research on selenium sources and related-health effects in the Brazilian Amazon is in environmental health epidemiology, using an Ecosystem approach to health. Her research has made an important contribution to science, providing strong evidence that organic selenium from the diet maybe less toxic than other forms of selenium and a key element in counteracting deleterious effects of mercury in fish-eating populations. Since January 2008, Mélanie Lemire has been working in close collaboration with professors from several Canadian universities to build the first Canadian Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Health (CoPEH-Canada). As the Quebec-Acadie-Atlantique node coordinator of CoPEH-Canada, her role was to create a dynamic collaborative network of researchers and graduate students involved and/or interested in Ecosystem Approaches to Health in the eastern part of the country and to strengthen communications and collaborations with other stakeholders such as the members of the scientific community, local and provincial organisations and the general public. She was also involved in the organisation of two Cafés Scientifiques, and in coordination and teaching at the three CoPEH-Canada intensive short courses. She has also been a member of CoPEH-LAC, a Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Health in Latin America and the Caribbean for the last six years. In this CoPEH, she has been involved in the coordination, organisation and teaching of the Ecosystem Approaches to Health in different events throughout Central and South America, and has develop an extensive network of collaboration in several countries and with others CoPEHs.
2010 Katherine Smith
Conservation medicine, public health, environmental policy and global ecology are major influences in Kate Smith’s scientific research. As Consulting Senior Scientist at EcoHealth Alliance (formerly Wildlife Trust) and Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University, Kate’s research focuses on emerging infectious disease, their implications for human health and native wildlife. Under her guidance, Kate’s team at Brown University focuses on existing research in the fields of conservation medicine, disease biogeography and species extinction to develop solutions to address critical issues for ecosystem, human and wildlife health. While advising undergraduates, graduate students and a postdoctoral student at Brown University, Kate also teaches a course in Conservation Medicine. At EcoHealth Alliance, Kate leads research efforts on wildlife trade and examines the role of disease in species extinction, the global distribution of human infectious agents, and most recently the potential for global wildlife trade to facilitate disease emergence. Kate earned her B.S. in Biology from the University of New Mexico and Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology from the University of California Santa Barbara – both with honors. She conducted postdoctoral research as a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow with Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. Kate’s research has been published in various prestigious journals such as Science, Ecology, Conservation Biology and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. She is the recipient of numerous honors including dissertation awards from the University of California Office of the President and American Association of University Women. Kate is a review editor for the journal EcoHealth and member of the scientific advisory committee for EcoHealth DIVERSITAS. She has participated in various NCEAS working groups on infectious disease ecology and has organized international conference symposia on the topic.