 Our team works on the intersection of weather, climate and human health. I think that medical anthropology traditionally focuses on human health, but from a biological or linguistic or cultural or social perspective. And what we've done here is brought the climate and the weather component into the study of medical anthropology. So I think we're augmenting that field of study by the type of work we do. And I can say from the perspective of a meteorologist that it's really been eye-opening to have an interdisciplinary collaboration like we do. In particular, I think as meteorologists we tend to see problems from our perspective and in terms of human health issues, you rapidly realize particularly through field work that there are really a lot of different drivers that can determine a given human health outcome of which weather and climate are only one. Our group typically addresses what could be broadly characterized as three types of questions. Some of the questions are trying to gain a basic understanding of how climate-sensitive disease systems work. Other questions we address are really linked at developing decision support tools that can help aid stakeholders such as mosquito control personnel or public health decision makers in making their decisions. And the third type of questions we address are linked with how climate change may impact human health outcomes in the future. We often work on dengue fever, which is a mosquito-borne disease. And so when we go out into the field, we're really collecting data on the mosquitoes but also on the humans they bite, as well as the different types of ecological settings in which we find both the humans and the mosquitoes. So we collect immature mosquitoes, which is no easy task, let me tell you, when you have a little pipette and you're going from container to container, whether it's a tire or a bucket and you're trying to take out larvae and pupae, it's very time consuming, but we also collect adult mosquitoes. And we like to talk to humans in the field because we're interested in what they're doing to protect themselves from mosquito-borne diseases. So for example, do they have windows and doors that are screened? Do they wear repellent at the times of day when the mosquito is biting? Do they empty the standing water in which the mosquitoes lay their eggs? That type of thing. One of the questions we often receive is, will climate change have adverse effects on human health? And I think for many of the problems that Mary and I study, the answer is that climate change has the potential to exacerbate human health issues or to create more suitable conditions for disease transmission. So if it's warmer, it can go through more generations and you can get more mosquitoes. It also affects how long the adult mosquitoes live. It affects how quickly viruses can replicate, how quickly they can incubate within the mosquito. The kind of efficiency with which it can transmit a virus, so lots of ways. Water through rainfall also provides habitats for mosquitoes, so numerous ways. And weather can also affect human behavior. It can make, for example, in warm conditions people might be outdoors more or if it's rainy, they might be indoors more. So their exposure to disease vectors changes with the weather as well. But again, there are all of these other factors that we also have to consider in the future. Like how will human behavior change? How will socioeconomic conditions change? What types of changes in medical technology will occur? For example, will a vaccine for a given vector-borne disease be developed? So there are also other factors that could change the outcome, future outcomes of human health in addition to climate. And I think one of the other things I was going to mention is an NSF-funded project for which Andy was the PI. We found the mosquito 80s Egypti at 2100 meters, so we were able to document it for the first time at that elevation in Mexico. And in this particular town where we found the mosquito, we had seen a 0.2 degree Celsius rise in temperature each decade for the past four decades. One of the interesting things we found is that there are no socioeconomic or other behavioral barriers to this mosquito being able to establish in those higher elevation areas. And that's important because up on the Altiplano, that's near Mexico City where we have about 20 million people who currently are exposed to the viruses that this mosquito transmits. Many of the hotspots that we see for vector-borne diseases today are in low-income countries in where people's vulnerability is high and in tropical and subtropical areas where their exposure to disease vectors is also high. In terms of where future hotspots might be, I think that's one of the questions that we're very interested in getting at. And while we might be able to kind of get at some of the future exposure issues, how exposure might change, we're having more difficulty answering how human vulnerability might change in the future. And I think even in some of the countries that we consider middle-income countries, we see areas, we see pockets within those countries of poverty. And those are the areas where we have the most difficulty with vector-borne diseases because people have fewer resources to protect themselves. They don't necessarily have air conditioning. And we see this in these southern United States as well, that some of our poorest counties along the Texas-Mexico border, for example, are areas where we've seen repeated outbreaks of dengue fever. And along those lines, with vector control or trying to keep the mosquitoes at bay, those vector control agencies are often funded by taxes. And if you're in an area where the socioeconomic conditions are somewhat lower, you may have fewer resources to control mosquitoes as well. We've had many different vector-borne diseases in the Americas for a long time. We had yellow fever in Spanish Florida in the 1640s. There's a dengue outbreak in Philadelphia in the 1780s. And so throughout much of the Americas, climate has been suitable for vector-borne diseases. And what we've seen in terms of, for example, a contraction of vector-borne disease transmission in the United States has not been attributed to kind of unsuitable climate. It's more improved socioeconomic conditions and people becoming less exposed to mosquito vectors over the years. So this underscores how important it is when we look at the potential for climate change to affect vector-borne diseases that we also look at human behavioral and socioeconomic factors. We have a very unique program here at NCAR in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whereby we bring in postdoctoral fellows for two years. And these fellows spend a year here at NCAR learning about our weather, climate, and health program, and working on developing climate models. And then they spend a year at CDC also working on modeling, but also learning more about epidemiology. So we feel that we have a unique cohort of fellows who've graduated from this program and we'll have two more coming in shortly. But they're able to bridge that gap between climate and health from both sides of the coin. So I think that the field will continue to be a healthy one as we move into the future. No pun intended. Yeah, that's true.