SPEAKERS

Dr. Amy Collins is an emergency physician in the Boston suburbs and a sustainable health care professional. Under her leadership, MetroWest Medical Center received numerous Environmental Excellence Awards from Practice Greenhealth, including the Environmental Leadership Circle Award, the most prestigious award offered. She also worked as a sustainable health care consultant for Vanguard Health Systems and implemented sustainability programs at Vanguard’s 26 hospitals nationwide. She now serves as the Medical Director for Physician Engagement and Education at Health Care Without Harm leading their Physician Network, with a goal to support physicians and medical students who are interested in promoting environmentally responsible, climate-smart health care and other climate solutions. She speaks internationally about the intersection between climate change, health and health care and the role of the health care sector in leading climate solutions.

Dr. Joshua Wortzel completed psychiatry residency at the University of Rochester, where he was a chief resident, an Academic Psychiatry Trainee Editorial Fellow, and an APA/APAF Leadership Fellow. He received his medical degree at Stanford University. His research focus has been on studying and advocating for the impacts of climate change on mental health. He has over fifteen peer reviewed publications and book chapters and has been published several times in national and professional organization news periodicals. In 2023, he was appointed the chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Committee on Climate Change and Mental Health and the vice-chair of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s (AACAP) Resource Group on Climate Mental Health. He was selected nationally as a fellow of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) think tank, where he serves on the Climate Mental Health Committee. He also serves on the steering committee for the national non-profit Climate Psychiatry Alliance (CPA). He has presented on the topic of climate change and mental health to national audiences within the APA and AACAP and at grand rounds across the country. As part of the R-25 research program at Brown, he is currently studying the effects of heat on suicide in young people and the impact that distress about climate change has on their mental health. 

Leo Kobayashi MD is Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, attending physician at Rhode Island Hospital Emergency Department.  He completed his emergency medicine residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital / Massachusetts General Hospital and has significant clinical and research experience from patient care, academic, research, and teaching duties at Rhode Island Hospital, the Lifespan Medical Simulation Center, and the Alpert Medical School of Brown University.   Dr. Kobayashi's current research programs focus on bedside clinical informatics / point-of-care information design + delivery; patient monitoring / telemetry systems (alarm fatigue; non-contact vital signs acquisition); clinical environment engineering; and mitigation of the environmental impact of healthcare device research and development.

Ankur Shah, MD is Assistant Professor of Medicine, Interim Director for Clinical Research, and Associate Fellowship Program Director in the Division of Kidney Disease and Hypertension at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He completed his clinical training in internal medicine at Temple University Hospital and nephrology and medical education at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and is currently completing his MPH at the T. H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. His primary academic interests are dialysis in special populations including including peritoneal dialysis, home hemodialysis, and on-site dialysis in skilled nursing facilities as well as the impact of climate change on kidney disease; topics in which he is well published and has lectured both nationally and internationally. He is the ASN delegate to the medical society consortium on climate change and health as well as a member of the RIMS climate change and health committee. He is a decorated educator having received the dean’s excellence in teaching award, department of medicine teaching award, positive champion of the learning environment Award, and nephrology fellowship teaching awards at Brown and is a past winner of the American Society of Nephrology’s innovations in kidney education contest.

Dr. Kyle Denison Martin is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He received his Doctorate of Osteopathy from the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine. He also received a Masters of Arts in Bioethics and Masters of Public Health from Michigan State University. Dr. Martin completed his specialty training in Emergency Medicine at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Michigan. He completed a Diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and has a Certificate of Knowledge in Clinical Tropical Medicine and Travelers' Health from the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene. Dr. Martin is an Affiliate Faculty of the Institute at Brown University for Environment and Society (IBES). He is also Affiliate Faculty at the Global Health Institute (GHI) of Brown University.

Stefanie Friedhoff is co-founder and co-director of the Information Futures Lab (IFL), Professor of the Practice, and Senior Director of Strategy and Innovation at the Brown University School of Public Health. She is a leading media, communications and global health strategist, and an expert at knowledge translation, information creation, and verification. From July 2022 to May 2023, Friedhoff served as a senior policy advisor on the White House Covid-19 Response Team, focusing on population information needs, health equity, community engagement, and medical countermeasure uptake. At Brown, Friedhoff studies information ecosystems and the relationships between information needs, information inequities, and health outcomes. Partnering with creators of trusted information in rapidly changing information ecosystems, she creates co-designing and capacity-building opportunities and research initiatives aimed at meeting the information needs of diverse populations. Throughout her career, Friedhoff has worked as a foreign correspondent, feature writer, editor and photographer on three continents. Her stories have been published in TIME, The Boston Globe, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Nieman Reports, and many other publications. She was a 2001 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. 

Heather A. Smith, MPH, MD, FACOG is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist, educator, and leader in women’s health advocacy. She is an Assistant Professor at Brown University, serving as an Academic Generalist as
well as the Director of Quality and Equity for the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Women & Infants Hospital. Her work is centered on addressing disparities in maternal outcomes and patient experiences, with a focus on improved communication and community engagement. Active in health policy and advocacy, Dr. Smith is the President to the Rhode Island Medical Society, immediate past Chair to the AMA Council on Legislation, and a delegate representing the American College for Obstetricians and Gynecologists to the AMA. Her Presidential Priorities for this term are supporting physician wellness, maintaining practice sustainability, enhancing member value.

Alison Hayward, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor in the division of Global Emergency Medicine in the Department of Emergency Medicine. She obtained her medical degree from Penn State College of Medicine and her public health master's degree from University of Massachusetts. She completed residency and fellowship in disaster medicine and emergency management, both at University of Massachusetts, and has served as Director of Medical Student Education at Yale's Department of Emergency Medicine, currently is Global Education Coordinator in her division. Her main academic interests are global public health and medical education. Dr. Hayward served as co-founder and director for the Uganda Village Project in rural eastern Uganda for 10 years, overseeing public health programs including malaria prevention, family planning, water, sanitation and hygiene. She continues to serve on the Uganda Village Project board.

Allan Just is an environmental epidemiologist and Associate Professor of Epidemiology & Environment and Society. His areas of research include children's environmental health, remote sensing and air pollution modeling with satellite data, climate and health epidemiology, and epigenomics. His research investigates how better estimates of the quality of the air we breathe and the temperature in our neighborhoods reveal previously underestimated exposure disparities and health impacts. He uses NASA satellite products and spatiotemporal machine learning to reconstruct environmental exposures to fine particulate matter (PM2.5), air temperature, and humidity in epidemiologic health studies with cohorts and large registries across the US and Mexico. After obtaining his ScB in Environmental Science at Brown, Dr. Just received his PhD in Environmental Health Science from Columbia University, and completed postdoctoral training in environmental epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He was faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai from 2015 through June 2023, where he remains an adjunct Associate Professor in Environmental Medicine and Public Health. He joined the faculty at Brown School of Public Health and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society in July 2023.

In her climate research, Kim Cobb uses observations of past and present climate to advance our understanding of future climate change impacts, with a focus on climate extremes and coastal flood hazards. She received her B.A. from Yale University in 1996, and her Ph.D. in Oceanography from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in 2002. Prior to joining Brown in 2022, she served as Director of the Global Change Program at Georgia Tech, Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and ADVANCE Professor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In her research, Kim has sailed on oceanographic cruises and led caving expeditions in the Borneo rainforests. She received a NSF CAREER Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and the Hans Oeschger Medal from the European Geosciences Union in 2019. She was elected as a AAAS Fellow in 2021, and was a Lead Author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, released in 2021. As a mother to four, Kim is a strong advocate for women in science, and champions diversity and inclusion in all that she does. She is also devoted to the communication of climate change to the public through media appearances, public speaking, and social media channels, and enjoys frequent exchanges with policymakers about climate impacts and solutions.

Dr. Kate Moretti is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine for Brown Emergency Medicine and
Climate Change and Healthcare Sustainability coordinator through the Division of Global Emergency
Medicine at Brown University. Her research focuses on both the health implications of climate change as
well as the impacts of healthcare itself on climate change with a specific focus on the health impacts of
heat. She received her Medical Doctorate from the Albany Medical College in Albany, New York,
attended residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. She completed a Global Health
Fellowship and received a Master’s in Clinical and Translational Research at Brown.

Bonnie has worked in the news industry for more than 30 years. A graduate of The University of Rhode Island, she started her career at The North Kingstown Standard-Times. From there, she worked at The Woonsocket Call, the Lynn (Mass.) Daily Item, and the Middletown (Conn.) Press. She spent the majority of her career — 19 years — as an editor at the Hartford Courant. She was part of the Courant newsroom team that won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting and was also part of the team that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for the coverage of the Sandy Hook school shootings. She left The Courant in 2016 and worked as the deputy editor of the Connecticut Health Investigative Team, a nonprofit news site. She also is an adjunct journalism professor at The University of Connecticut.