Dr. Patchen is a Lecturer with Cornell’s Public Health Program in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, College of Veterinary Medicine, and the Concentration Chief for the Public Health Program’s concentration in Environment, Climate, and Health. She teaches core courses for MPH students focused on the foundations of public health, One Health, systems thinking, evidence-based writing, health equity, and addressing complex problems to improve human and ecosystem health. Before becoming a Lecturer, she worked as a Postdoctoral Associate with the Public Health Program on the Healthy Kids, Healthy Planet project examining factors affecting access to nature in elementary schools.
Prior to this, Dr. Patchen had various roles on projects related to science education + equity. This has included teaching high school students to use hydroponics to address food deserts in their neighborhoods and a citizen/public science project collecting and sharing air quality data with communities (as a doctoral student at Boston College), global health case studies for a Cornell program in Tanzania (Cornell Global Health Program), local food system work in Tompkins County (Childhood Nutrition Collaborative), food system outreach in New York State (Cornell Community Nutrition), and high school chemistry and Earth science (Chicago Public Schools).
To better incorporate extreme heat and people-centered disasters into U.S. emergency management, Congress and federal agencies should take several interrelated actions.
The undercounting of deaths related to extreme heat and other people-centered disasters — like extreme cold and smoke waves — hinders the political and public drive to address the problem.
To protect the health and well-being of the nation’s children, the federal government must facilitate efforts to collect the data required to drive extreme heat mitigation and adaptive capacity in the classroom.