Human Health x Extreme Heat
Event Description
What actually happens inside your body when it gets too hot, and why does that make heat a public health problem rather than just a weather forecast?
Extreme heat kills more people worldwide than any other climate-driven hazard, yet it is one of the least visible. This keynote and panel follows heat from the scale of a single body to the scale of a city. Eleni Myrivili, the world’s first Global Chief Heat Officer, opens with how cities around the world are working to protect people. A panel of researchers then takes up what heat does to our health, who is most at risk, and what actually works to keep people safe, from cooling strategies for workers to helping rural communities prepare. The morning closes with an audience Q&A.
Event Schedule
9:00 Coffee and breakfast served
9:30 Keynote speech
Eleni Myrivili, Global Chief Heat Officer (Zoom)
Eleni Myrivili is the world’s first Global Chief Heat Officer. She’s a leading voice on heat resilience and one of the first people to bring attention to this growing problem. She’s worked with cities around the globe to protect people from extreme heat. Prior to this position, she was elected to the Athens city government and served as Deputy Mayor for Urban Nature and Chief Resilience Officer. She spent years designing and oversaw the execution of multimillion dollar green infrastructure projects. She sits on the boards of the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change and the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Advisory Board. Formerly a university professor, she holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University.
10:00 Panel
John Openshaw, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine), Stanford School of Medicine
John Openshaw is an infectious disease physician and medical epidemiologist whose work centers on how the environment shapes health, particularly in low-resource settings. He trained in ecology and political science before going into medicine. His team works in informal settlements in Makassar, Indonesia, measuring heat exposure in indoor and outdoor environments and developing, deploying, and evaluating heat-specific interventions for both structural and personal cooling. From 2020 to 2022 he served as COVID-19 clinical team lead for the California Department of Public Health’s pandemic response.
H. Craig Heller, Lorry I. Lokey/Business Wire Professor of Biology and Human Biology, Stanford
H. Craig Heller is a Stanford biologist who has spent more than five decades studying how the brain controls body temperature, sleep and circadian rhythms. His early research on hibernating mammals showed how the brain’s thermostat is adjusted during hibernation and sleep, and he is recognized as a pioneer in understanding how the two states differ and interact. His studies of temperature regulation also led to the discovery that the primary heat exchange surfaces in humans are the hairless skin of the palms, soles and face. Today his lab investigates the roles of sleep and circadian rhythms in learning and memory, and as director of Stanford’s Down Syndrome Research Center he helped identify a class of drugs that restores learning and memory in mouse models of the condition. He co-authors the textbook Life: The Science of Biology and has taught physiology to generations of Stanford undergraduates.
Scarlet Sands-Bliss, Research Associate, Tracking California
Scarlet Sands-Bliss works with Tribal representatives, behavioral health workers, and other community partners in rural Lake County on how communities can prepare for extreme heat. Her research uses community-engaged methods to advance environmental justice and climate resilience. Tracking California is an independent environmental public health surveillance and research program at the Public Health Institute that has spent nearly 25 years collecting and publishing data on the health effects of environmental exposures. It has tracked heat-related illness statewide for more than two decades and partners with communities to build that data into heat prevention. Its recent statewide analysis of 1.3 million emergency department visits and hospitalizations found that extreme heat days were linked to more acute care visits among unhoused Californians, with stronger associations than among comparable housed adults.
10:45 Q&A