Virtual Café: Planetary Health and Climate Change

Virginia is public health doctor committed to improving health emergency and disaster risk management as well as data access and transparency for effective reporting and is currently Head of Global Disaster Risk Reduction at the UK Health Security Agency. Prior to this she has been a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, published in March 2012. From 2011 to 2014, she was Head of Extreme Events and Health Protection she is a member of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) scientific committee. With support of IRDR, she is currently the Chair of the UNDRR/ISC Hazard Classification and Review Technical Working Group, and the report was published in 2020 with Hazard Information Profiles: Supplement to UNDRR-ISC Hazard Definition & Classification Review – Technical Report published in October 2021. She is a visiting/honorary Professor and fellow at several universities.

Photo: Professor Virginia Murray, taken at the High-level Political Forum, United Nations, New York July 2019

Jeremy Pivor is the Senior Program Coordinator for the Planetary Health Alliance. For over a decade, he has worked in environmental conservation, international climate change diplomacy, and public health. His conservation efforts have brought him around the world from the United States, Madagascar, the Sargasso Sea, the Coral Triangle region in Southeast Asia, to Indonesia Borneo. He cherishes working with and bridging partnerships with organizations from the local to international scale.

Jeremy has particularly focused on conservation in Indonesia. As a Henry Luce Foundation Scholar, he served as a Program Support Officer with the Coral Triangle Center (CTC) in Bali. He traveled around the country helping to connect CTC’s local marine protected area efforts with government, international development, and non-profit partners. Following that experience, Jeremy was the research coordinator for a joint medical facility and forest conservation organization, Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI), in Kalimantan where he organized and conducted a health and environment survey distributed in 23 villages surrounding a refuge for orangutans in Gunung Palung National Park. Beyond the beautiful natural environments found in Indonesia, Jeremy loves the language, food, and most of all the friendly people. He now serves as an advisor to the executive director for ASRI’s partner, Health in Harmony.

As a cancer survivor, Jeremy cares passionately about health justice, and regards health equity as intricately intertwined with environmental justice. When Jeremy is not focusing on environmental and public health, he passionately advocates for the brain tumor and young adult cancer communities through writing, public speaking, fundraising, and lobbying. His work has been featured in the Washington Post, Cure, and several other publications. He loves to sail, play board games, and most of all spend time with his family and friends.

Jeremy received an MS from the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health’s Joint Medical Program, where he focused on the social determinants of health, and a BA in Environmental Biology from Washington University in St. Louis, where he graduated summa cum laude as an Ethan A.H. Shepley Scholar, the University’s highest honor.

Jimena Montserrat Torres González is a young Mexican fifteen year old scientist that broke down all the stereotypes. As a girl, she enjoyed playing with dinosaurs, chemistry games, puzzles, cowboys and wrestlers. She got involved in the Adopt a Talent Program when she was eight years old where she developed a volcanic ash based fertilizer project and a for the lasts years she has been working on the project “Evaluation of the biodegradation of Unicel from tenebrio molitor”. The main purpose of this project is to find a solution to the high levels of contamination produced by this polymer.

She has a degree in Industrial Chemistry from the Faculty of Chemical Sciences; with a Master’s and Ph.D. in Science, both in the Specialty in Materials Science, carried out at the Luis Rivera Terrazas Institute of Physics, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), México. She did her postdoctoral stay at the Institute of Chemistry, UNAM.
She belongs to the National System of Researchers Level I, has a Desirable Prodep Profile, and is part of the BUAP’s Researchers Register.
She is a Full Professor at the Research Center of Semiconductor Devices, BUAP.

Dra. Robles has done research stays in:

• Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia
• Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain
• Elettra Synchrotron in Trieste, Italy.
• Canadian Light Source, Saskatoon, Canada.

Her research interests are:

• Structural study of advanced materials: semiconductor oxides, biomaterials, and composites.
• Synthesis of advanced materials by soft chemistry
• Structural, morphological, optical, and textural properties of advanced materials.
• Physicochemical properties of advanced materials
• Degradation of emerging pollutants in water by heterogeneous photocatalysis
• Development of photovoltaic and electrochromic devices
• Study of gas sensors based on metal oxides.

Her projects focus on environmental and energy applications of hybrid semiconductor systems; the development of composites with potential biomedical applications.

Dra. Robles has authored or coauthored more than 20 peer-reviewed research journals. In addition, she is involved in divulging science and technology to young people.

Arturo Erubiel Hernández Tirado is an Earth Scientist with a specialty in environmental studies and a post-graduate student of Philosophy of Science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has experience in science communication, creating audiovisual media for radio, tv, social networks, and scientific photography. He also performs drone flights to analyze aerial images and videos of soil formation factors, algae growth status, vegetation, landscape, and geomorphology.

Since 2018 participates as a mentor and teacher at the Adopt a Talent Program, sharing science and working with students and professors to propose projects related to environmental problems and urban ecology.