Lam, a paleontologist and paleoceanographer, is an assistant professor in Harpur College’s Earth Sciences Department, but she was raised in a rural town in Hanover County, Va. Its location deep in the state’s backwoods aided Lam in her first scientific explorations: She collected rocks and animal skulls and learned how to distinguish between mineral types.

Now she studies a group of marine plankton called planktic foraminifera that live in the surface ocean. Foraminifera secrete a calcium carbonate shell, and when they die those shells collect in layers on the sea floor over millions of years. Lam’s goal is to date the sediments using the first and last occurrences of certain species of foraminifera preserved in the fossil record. This process is known as biostratigraphy.

Using the fossil plankton shells, researchers can reconstruct oceanic conditions across ancient warm periods to predict how Earth’s systems will react to climate change. For example, by looking at the Mid-Piacenzian Warm Period, which took place about 3.3 million years ago, researchers found that there was almost as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then as there is now.

“With the chemistry of their [foraminifera] tests, we can actually infer things about climate change such as water temperatures, salinity changes, ice volume changes and also productivity changes in the water column through time,” Lam says.

Biostratigraphers normally rely on a particular scheme to tell the age of the rocks, but Lam realized that it was not universally applicable.

Plankton are migratory by nature and move to other areas over large spans of time. Therefore, her lab has been focused on creating more- nuanced schemes for telling time with the fossil plankton in different areas of the ocean.

Lam has zoomed in on the foraminifera of the southwestern Pacific Ocean’s mid-latitude region. She’s using the geochemistry of the plankton to reconstruct surface water temperature, salinity values and more.

The work is an extension of postdoctoral research Lam began at Binghamton as well as a continuation of her dissertation project. She earned her doctorate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in geosciences; that’s also where she was when she went on her first ocean expedition. After an extensive application process to board the ship, selected researchers work 12 hours a day while at sea for two months straight.

To Lam, it isn’t a bad trade. Scientists put in long days at sea, but daily tasks such as cooking, cleaning and laundry were taken care of by the crew. Many of Lam’s experiments are sourced from underwater sediment cores that she and her research team obtained during this trip.

“One of the most vivid memories from sailing in the Tasman Sea is going out onto the deck at night and looking up at the sky,” Lam recalls. “I’ve never seen the sky so clear. There’s no light pollution, and you can see the Milky Way stretching across the entire sky. It is breathtaking.”

For her dissertation research, Lam reconstructed the Kuroshio Current Extension, a western boundary current that supplies warmth to waters near Japan, and helps support a wide diversity of marine life. She wanted to observe the behavior of foraminifera as the Kuroshio’s warm waters met with the Arctic’s cold currents, creating a transitory area of warm and cool water species called an ecotone. More specifically, she wanted to quantify how many species were able to sustain life in the now-temperate waters.

“One of the papers we published found that actually, for the last at least 12 million years, there’s very high diversity within the Kuroshio Current Extension throughout this time period,” Lam says. “And we think that means two things: One, that this current has sustained planktic foraminifera for a really long time in that region. Two, that the Kuroshio Current Extension’s ecotone has been a prevalent feature in the Northwest Pacific for a very long time.”

Lam was interested to learn that foraminifera showed a greater diversity at 37° north latitude, which is much higher than the field’s previously predicted latitude at which foraminiferal diversity peaks.

“This is called the latitudinal diversity gradient, and a lot of biological studies say that the tropics hold the highest diversity of organisms — that’s not true for all species,” Lam says. “So our study found that the latitudinal diversity gradient for foraminifera may actually be a little different. … We were showing higher diversity at higher latitudes.”

Although Lam loves research, the coolest part of her job has been teaching students all about her passion: geology. Lam has a special message she likes to leave with all of her students throughout their time together.

“My first comment is: You belong, everyone belongs,” says Lam, who was a first-generation college student. “Academia may not have been made for everyone at first, but it surely is today. The second piece of advice I have is to find mentors — not just advisors; find mentors. These are people who are going to help you along in your career. It’s just finding people you can rely on, that you can vent to. That will give you good advice and support you, no matter what.”

Zili Yang’s monograph, titled “The Environment and Externality: Theory, Algorithms and Applications,” was published in December by Cambridge University Press.

“If we don’t cooperate, if each individual strives for their own interest, collectively we create an economy with uncontrolled pollution,” says Yang, a professor of economics who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2002. “If we cooperate, pollution can be controlled efficiently.”

Some ideas in the book are inspired by the RICE model (Regional Integrated Climate-Economy model) made famous by William Nordhaus. The 2018 Nobel laureate was Yang’s doctoral adviser at Yale University.

Think of the global economy as a cake to be shared among countries. It can be sliced in various ways. Right now, some slices are very large and others are quite thin. As economists think about ways to address climate change and reduce pollution, few if any countries are willing to go away from the table with a smaller piece of that cake.

Yang wants to find a way to divide the cake as fairly as possible. This cutting method is at the core of his work.

Yang begins the new book with a brief discussion of the concept of externality. When some people’s or countries’ welfares are affected by others’ activities without their explicit consent, then externality exists, he writes.

This is a core challenge of environmental economics. Why? Because all pollution hurts people. It may not harm you personally, but it’s hurting someone.

When people, countries or regions cooperate, they internalize this externality. The cake gets bigger, so to speak, but when it’s sliced some countries may still walk away with less than they had before.

“Most times it’s politically infeasible,” Yang says.

His goal? Come up with a cutting method where every country gets a larger slice of the new, larger cake.

The method many economists employ basically says we sum up all agents or countries to form a social welfare function (so 15 countries equals 15). Countries are treated as equals, whether they’re small or large and whether the climate impacts they face are significant or minimal.

“The ‘equal’ way is not fair,” Yang says.

Yang doesn’t think that Fiji and the United States should be weighted equally, for example. He would say 15 countries equals n; if you’re more significantly affected, you should be expected to do more to fix the problem. Likewise, if a country is responsible for more emissions, it should be responsible for more mitigation costs.

His method recognizes that countries have to see how their circumstances will be improved. “You can’t force people to collaborate if it makes them worse off than when they weren’t cooperating,” he says.

Yang is also the author of “Strategic Bargaining and Cooperation in Greenhouse Gas Mitigations,” published in 2008 by MIT Press.

In his earlier work, Yang worked with the RICE model to “cut the cake” fairly. What he came up with took months of trial and error.

In the new monograph, he outlines an algorithm that makes an accurate cut on the first attempt, no trial and error required. He says the outcome and its elegance surprised him.

“I apply the theory and try to tell non-economists about it so it can be useful in policy,” Yang says. “My conclusion is unique.”

Other methods rely on a second round of “cake cutting” to ensure greater fairness. Yang attempts to build in that fairness to start, then executes just one round of cutting. Most models accommodate three regions; his allows many more.

Some of Yang’s thinking is also based on understandings of bargaining that come from the work of Nobel laureate John Nash. In the early 1950s, Nash articulated the strategic interactions possible between two or more decision makers.

How do we make sure two people (or countries, or regions) want to cooperate? Yang says you have to ensure that both are better off if they work together than if they do not.

This is one reason that Yang is somewhat critical of the Paris climate accords; he thinks they don’t call for enough cooperation. The climate targets are too rigid, and countries’ actions are too independent, he says.

Yang hopes the ideas in his new book will be put to practical use. He provides all the algorithms so others can check his work, and the publisher will make a paperback copy available for sale, which may make it appealing as a textbook.

Jon M. Conrad, professor of resource economics at Cornell University, says the book will become an essential text for graduate-level courses in environmental economics. “Yang does a masterful job of determining the optimal level of externality in both static and dynamic models under cooperative, non-cooperative and coalitional solutions,” he wrote in a review of the book.

Yang sees himself as a scientist out to challenge established ways of thinking.

“You have to be skeptical,” he notes. “I don’t necessarily accept established results without questioning them. You want to find something other people haven’t noticed.”

Scientists initially thought the chemical composition of seawater was constant. In the late 20th century, however, indirect evidence revealed that seawater chemistry has changed systematically at particular time periods during the past 550 million years. Knowing how the oceans and climate changed previously gives scientists insights into how it might change in the future.

Weldeghebriel aims to understand what caused these changes. He believes they could be a result of variations in the rate of seafloor spreading and fluctuations in hydrothermal vents, which release ions that react with the existing seawater.

To substantiate this idea, Weldeghebriel and his advisor, Tim Lowenstein, analyze marine halite, a mineral that traps and preserves seawater during its formation. They have collected more than 150 halite samples from different locations and time periods dating back as far as 550 million years.

To study the contents of these samples, they use a state-of-the-art Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer. First, a laser beam drills through a halite sample and evaporates the seawater inside (that’s the “laser ablation” part). The contents are then transported to a mass spectrometer, which analyzes the masses of individual elements and isotopes.

This allows for analysis of minor and trace elements in seawater in addition to the major elements. Minor elements comprise between 0.1 percent and 1 percent of a solution; trace elements make up less than 0.1 percent. Major elements comprise the rest.

Weldeghebriel’s research, which he presented at the Northeastern Section meeting of the Geological Society of America in 2018, is important because previous interpretations were based on analysis of major elements only. His new data has allowed him to narrow down other interpretations and bring forth hard evidence toward his interpretation.

While growing up in northeastern Africa, Weldeghebriel became infatuated with geology. He was still in high school when a group of geologists came to display minerals in the annual Eritrea Festival.

“When I saw these beautiful crystals and different colored rocks, it was in my mind,” he says.

At the Eritrea Institute of Technology, he graduated at the top of his class, winning a college gold medal. When Weldeghebriel reached out to Lowenstein about graduate studies, Lowenstein was impressed.

“He knew a lot about the subject material before he came here,” says Lowenstein, a distinguished professor of geological sciences. “I took him very seriously from the moment we emailed one another.”

After graduate school, Weldeghebriel is considering going into industry to work on Potash, minerals useful for agriculture. Later, he hopes to go on to become a professor. In Eritrea, Weldeghebriel says, there are limited resources because it is a developing country with economic inefficiencies and shortages. This limited him in his undergraduate research, as he only had the resources to do basic analyses.

“In America, there is a lot of opportunity,” he says. “I get one of the biggest opportunities coming here, because I can do whatever I want to do.”

“If global warming is factually true — and I’m not making a scientific judgment here — then a rational government should do something,” said Yang, a professor of economics. “And suppose, hypothetically, that climate change is not true. You can burn fossil fuels all you like. Sooner or later you will still run into a situation that requires you to adopt a new technology. If we use climate change as an excuse for arriving sooner at alternative energy, it does not hurt anybody.”

Yang uses game theory to create a cost-benefit analysis of actions countries could take to curb global warming. His work is not political, but rather applies modeling and logic to the issue. “Advocates make the argument, sometimes without justification, and are quite emotional,” he said. “My approach shows the incentive to do something.”

Yang believes that the economic issues associated with climate change must be considered in tandem with the natural sciences. Researchers who work from this multidisciplinary perspective have created “integrated assessment,” or IA, models, which take into account climatology, ecology, regional sciences and engineering as well as economic concerns.

There are several IA models, including an influential system that Yang had a role in developing while he was a graduate student at Yale University in the 1990s. That model, named RICE (the Regional Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy), is fairly simple and small, said Yang, who has also worked on much larger models.

Yang said he thinks a small model such as RICE is “beautiful,” though the algorithm and simulation scenarios might seem complex to non-experts. “A simple model can tell more stories,” he explained.

In his book, Yang takes the RICE model and brings it to bear on another hot area in economics: game theory. Game theory allows economists to examine the decision-making process in a scenario in which there are multiple people making decisions and those actions affect the other people.

Yang writes in Strategic Bargaining and Cooperation in Greenhouse Gas Mitigations that he observed integrated assessment and game theory as “twin peaks in economic research on climate change” unconnected by any bridge. He set out to change that, with a powerful computer and research funding from the Department of Energy.

Among the book’s most important conclusions is that climate agreements cannot require too much of industrialized nations or too little from the rest of the world. “With climate change, everybody contributes to the problem,” Yang said. “Everybody emits CO2. And the environmental damage will be felt by everybody. So in that situation, it is not efficient to have only some countries shoulder the burden.”

Yang’s research has attracted international attention. Yang spoke last summer at a climate-change conference in Venice and spent the fall 2009 semester on sabbatical at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium.

“Zili Yang’s book provides a clear explanation of important analytical tools that are crucial to understanding and analyzing a country’s incentive to control climate change,” said Carlo Carraro, an environmental economist who is rector of the University of Venice and was an organizer of the conference there. He added that Yang’s model provided “crucial information” to policymakers who participated in the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen.

Influencing such discussions is at the core of Yang’s ambitions for his work.

“Fifteen years from now, from a science point of view, everything about climate change should be clear,” he said. “But at that time, will human beings still be able to do something? It’ll probably be too late. Now people debate whether global warming is true. What economists can do is to suggest some kind of reasonable policy approach.”

Climate change and its anticipated health effects vary by place, with broad regional impacts and disproportionate risks among various populations. Emerging diseases are among the most far-reaching consequences of global warming. In the decades ahead, we need to develop a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. That will require partnerships with health professionals and policymakers.

What’s an emerging disease?
Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, or ERIDs, are infectious diseases that have increased in incidence or geographic range, recently moved into new host populations, recently been discovered or are caused by newly evolved pathogens. Noteworthy also is their timeline; diseases have been classified as ERIDs if their incidence in humans has increased since the 1970s or threatens to increase in the near future.

ERIDs have received a lot of public attention due in part to recent pandemics and how rapidly they are diffusing globally. For example, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was the first pandemic to emerge in the 21st century. Following its initial diagnosis in November 2002 in Guangdong, China, it spread to more than 30 countries within six months. About 8,450 cases were diagnosed globally, with a 10 percent fatality rate.

Within a couple of years, concerns about SARS were overshadowed by the emergence of the H1N1 virus, which originated in Mexico and the southern United States in April 2009, and then spread to more than 206 countries in less than seven months. As of November 2009, H1N1 — also called swine flu — had infected 526,060 people, killing at least 6,770.

Commenting on this worrisome trend, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant noted that we might be entering the age of pandemics. This certainly may be the case since more than 30 new diseases have emerged or expanded their geographic territories during the last three decades. Some, such as the drug-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum malaria and tuberculosis, pose significant global health risks.

The climate change connection
Scientists are beginning to piece together the causal links between ERIDs and global warming. The underlying factors, the routes and the pathways of disease transmission, however, are complicated with potentially long latency periods. Alongside climate change and environmental disturbances, the underlying factors include the changing demographics of communities and human behaviors (urbanization, migration, risky behaviors); increasing global trade and travel; changes in industrial and agricultural practices (including food production, processing and distribution); the breakdown of public health measures in many countries; the overuse of antibiotics; and the development of resistant or new strains of disease pathogens.

More recently, some diseases have re-emerged because of bioterrorism (as in the case of anthrax), conflicts in world regions and persistent inequities among populations. Human susceptibility to ERIDs has also increased due to the aging population (longer life expectancies) and the adverse and synergistic effects of HIV/AIDs and other autoimmune diseases.

The spatial variability of climate change, the regional differentiation of its impacts and the rapid and intense spread of emergent diseases all suggest the need for a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. Such a framework will require a deeper level of understanding of the biophysical changes that are occurring in these places, the demographic characteristics of those areas and the range of social, institutional, technological and behavioral adaptations that are — or, in some cases, are not — being put in place to alleviate these challenges.

Like the anticipated changes in climate, the potential for loss of life as a result of exposure to these hazards varies. Some places, particularly low-lying coastal areas and floodplains, urban heat islands and disease vector border regions, are more likely to bear the brunt of these hazards than others. Societal impact will also vary from place to place, with disparate risks among different populations depending on pre-existing disadvantages such as racial/ethnic disparities and income inequalities.

Within the United States, for example, Hurricane Katrina uncovered the deep divide by race and class in New Orleans. Our study of the hazardous exposures arising from this 2005 catastrophic meteorological event showed that the most vulnerable populations living in the maximum inundated areas were minorities and low-income populations. This study confirmed that the biophysical attributes, socio-demographic characteristics and the local context of communities are key drivers of vulnerability when evaluating the health impact of climate change.

A recent call for public health preparedness for global climate change published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine underscores the need to formally incorporate a place-based approach in developing health strategies for these environmental threats. A focus on place, the authors argue, would emphasize the local nature of both human exposures and responses to these hazards. A spatial perspective would bring attention to the local areas that would be most affected by these events. The geographically based approach will showcase the strengths of the local people, enabling the collective participation of local stakeholders in environmental health planning to promote sustainable and livable communities.

Why look to geographers for answers?
Geographers bring numerous tools to the table to work with public health professionals and policy makers. Geographers can offer a number of analytical approaches and technologies for disease surveillance and intervention, including geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, geostatistics and cartography.

One such example can be drawn from the landscape epidemiology approach, which relies on geospatial methodologies to delineate the geographic territories of transmissible diseases. Using this approach, the ecological niche of a transmissible disease can be delineated by overlaying the spatial distribution of the pathogenic agent with the distribution of the disease vectors and host populations. Within this distribution range, one can determine the biophysical and social conditions that favor the survival and transmission of the disease pathogen. This approach has been used to monitor vector-borne ERIDs such as the West Nile virus and Lyme disease in the United States.

Another example of geography in action can be seen in the fight against malaria, another ERID. The disease is now endemic in 109 countries, with nearly 3.3 billion people at risk, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change, poverty, armed regional conflicts and the scourge of HIV/AIDS have all contributed to the persistence of this disease. These conditions, along with increasing globalization and international migration, have heightened concerns about its potential emergence or re-emergence in temperate regions. In the United States, for example, malaria is now the most commonly imported disease, with more than 1,000 cases reported each year. With the anticipated changes in temperature, rainfall and humidity, there’s a real possibility of re-emergence in the United States.

The use of geospatial models to predict malaria risk and transmission has been quite informative, with projected net increases in the global at-risk population to 8 billion by 2080. Though these models have been criticized for using coarse spatial resolutions and overly emphasizing temperature changes, the results provide a valuable starting point for countries to develop public health strategies. Along with the development of the predictive models, geographic fieldwork and site-specific activities have been beneficial in assessing the social, economic and behavioral factors that influence disease transmission, and the treatment or preventive practices used in high-risk communities.

One such study was recently undertaken in a low-income community in Sierra Leone, in which we assessed the prevalence, severity and duration of malaria episodes among 731 residents; their risk factors; knowledge, access and use of reliable treatment options; and the efficacy and benefits of alternative therapies. Chloroquine was still the most widely used therapy for malaria in this community despite the growing resistance of p falciparum parasites to this drug. The research findings provided a useful context for developing a health intervention program for the community. Educating residents about the environmental risk sources of malaria, in addition to promoting the use of bednets, homeopathic methods and artemisia-based therapies, offers hope for reducing the malaria burden in this community.

These efforts demonstrate the importance of scholarly engagements to develop and advance meaningful and sustainable approaches for dealing with environmental risks and health challenges that affect the livelihoods of residents in vulnerable communities.  As the threats from global climate change continue to emerge, the need for scientific networks that bolster such initiatives and collaborative partnerships across disciplines such as geography and public health becomes even greater.

For more on this topic

The Age of Pandemics by Larry Brilliant

The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2009