Researchers at Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute are tackling questions around climate change and its effects on biodiversity and human health. In 2022, Talking Eyes produced a series of three films examining the impact of climate on infectious diseases, biodiversity, and climate modeling.
Infectious Disease
Professors Jessica Metcalf, Bryan Grenfell and Gabe Vecchi are working together, across disciplines, to study the linkages between climate change and infectious disease. In this video, they tell us how they learned to talk to each other, instead of past each other, to forge collaboration and to answer critical questions for today’s interconnected and climate-challenged world.
Biodiversity
Ecosystem health is crucial for biodiversity, but it’s declining rapidly around the world, making it more challenging for many plants and animals to thrive.
In this video, ecology and evolutionary biology professors Mary “Cassie” Stoddard and Jonathan Levine share about their research tracking species like the broad tail hummingbird and simulating environmental change. Their work, along with that of modelers, mathematicians, and other researchers at Princeton, provides insights into how plants, animals and ecosystems may function in the future with implications for human health and well-being.
Climate Modeling
Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land surfaces interact and combine in powerful, yet often unseen, ways as part of a complex planetary system that determines the climate. Over many decades, researchers at Princeton University have played a leading role in the development of advanced computational models that simulate interactions among these elements to inform an understanding of future climate scenarios under varying conditions.
In this video, climate scientists Gabe Vecchi and Laure Resplandy discuss how computational models are used to project future climate scenarios and inform mitigation strategies.
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