Dr. Epstein is a widely published public health physician and medical educator with expertise in the areas of marine ecosystems, infectious diseases, and global climate change. He is a member of the Harvard Working Group on New and Resurgent Infectious Diseases and an author of both the Health Section of the IPCC 2nd Assessment Report and the WHO/WMO/UNEP report Climate Change and Human Health. He was the recipient of a National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's Office of Global Programs and NASA grant to study the health, ecological, and economic dimensions of global change in marine environments. Dr. Epstein is a member of the Harvard University Committee on the Environment.
Dr. Epstein is Associate Director of the Center for Health and Global Environment (CHGE) at the Harvard Medical School. Some of his recent publications include: "Climate and Health," Science, 1999: 285: 347-348; (with others) "Biodiversity and Emerging Infectious Diseases: Integrating Health and Ecosystem Monitoring." in Biodiversity and Human Health. F. Grifo and J. Rosenthal, Eds. (Washington, D.C., Island Press, 1997) and (with Rita Colwell and Tim Ford, "Marine Ecosystems," Lancet, (1993), 342: 1216-1219 as well as the recent article, "Implications of Global Warming for Public Health", in The Climate Report, Vol. 2, No. 1, (Winter, 2001), pp. 14-17.* * *
James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography and Director of Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He holds faculty appointments in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and he is the Head Tutor for degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy. He is also Master of Pforzheimer House. He received his BS degree in Biology from Gonzaga University and his Ph.D. in Oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
His research interests relate to the regulation of plankton productivity in the sea, and in recent years have focused in particular on the cycling of nitrogen in planktonic ecosystems in diverse oceanic regions. He is an author of many scientific papers, and he currently teaches courses on biological oceanography and biogeochemical cycles, marine ecosystems, and global change and human health. Recently he published an article summarizing the state of the IPCC process entitled: "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Third Assessment Report, 2001," in The Climate Report, Vol. 2, No. 1, (Winter, 2001), pp. 2-5.
Dr. McCarthy has served and serves on many national and international planning committees, advisory panels, and commissions relating to oceanography, polar science, and the study of climate and global change. From 1986 to 1993, he chaired the international committee that establishes research priorities and oversees implementation of the International Geosphere - Biosphere Program. He was the founding editor for the American Geophysical Union's Global Biogeochemical Cycles. For the UN body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he is the co-chair of the working group with responsibility for assessing impacts of and vulnerabilities to global climate change. In 1988-89, he lectured on several campuses as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1997, he was the recipient of the New England Aquarium¹s David B Stone award for distinguished service to the environment and the community.
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