Panelist Biographies

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  Nicole de Paula (IASS Potsdam)

  Dr. Nicole de Paula is the inaugural Klaus Töpfer Sustainability Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany. For more than a decade, she has been globally connecting policymakers and researchers to create a public understanding of key issues related to sustainability, the environment, and public health. Previously of her work in Germany, she was the executive director of a think-tank in Bangkok, Thailand, hosted by Mahidol University at the Faculty of Public Health focused on the operationalization of the One Health approach in Southeast Asia and Latin America. She is the founder of the Women Leaders for Planetary Health and co-founder of an interdisciplinary research group on Planetary Health at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

  
  Dr. Nicole de Paula holds a PhD in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris and has been consulting with several international organizations under the UN system on themes related to global health, climate change, biodiversity, chemicals, financial and urban affairs. In the past, she has also been the French Embassy fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC and a researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science as part of the Global Public Policy Network (GPPN). Since 2012, Dr. Nicole de Paula has also been a team leader and writer for the reputable Earth Negotiations Bulletin, published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). Her most recent research focuses on decision making and international cooperation in the post-Covid-19 world, as well as digitalization and sustainability. In 2020, Dr. Nicole de Paula successfully concluded the executive course "Blockchain: Technologies and Applications for Business" at Berkeley Haas School of Business, University of California. She is currently the review editor for the journal Frontiers in Public Health (Planetary Health) and for the Brazilian Journal of International Politics.

  As a pioneer in the field named planetary health, she champions the socio-economic advancement of women through environmental conservation and public health policies to make the UN Sustainable Development Goals a reality by 2030.

  In 2020, Dr. Nicole de Paula was appointed as one of the Scientific Commissioners of the prestigious Pathfinder Initiative, chaired by former Prime Minister Helen Clark and Prof. Andy Haines. This initiative was launched at the UN “Race to Zero” Dialogues and supports progress towards a healthy, zero-carbon society with the support of influential partners, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network; C40-Cities; Wellcome Trust Foundation; OECD; and The Lancet. Finally, she is currently a member of the global committee preparing the global meeting of the Planetary Health Alliance, to be held in Brazil in April 2021. Originally from Brazil, she speaks Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish.

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  Christos Lynteris (University of St. Andrews)

  Christos Lynteris is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. A medical anthropologist investigating epistemological, biopolitical, and aesthetic aspects of infectious disease epidemics, he is the author of The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China (2012), Ethnographic Plague (2016), Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary (2019) and co-author with Lukas Engelmann of Sulphuric Utopias: The History of Maritime Sanitation (2020). He edited and co-edited the volumes Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion (2018), Plague and the City (2019), The Anthropology of Epidemics (2019), and Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains (2019). He was the Principal Investigator for the European Research Council funded project "Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic" (Cambridge 2012–2018; St Andrews, 2017–2018) and is currently the Principal Investigator of the Wellcome Investigator Award funded project "The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis" (St Andrews 2019–2024).

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  Nükhet Varlık (University of South Carolina)

  Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and Rutgers University–Newark. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease, medicine, and public health. She is the author of the book Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (2015) and editor of the volume Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (2017).

  Her new book project, “Empire, Ecology, and Plague: Rethinking the Second Pandemic (ca.1340s–ca.1940s),” examines the 600-year Ottoman plague experience in a global ecological context. In conjunction with this research, she is involved in developing the Black Death Digital Archive and contributing to multidisciplinary research projects that incorporate perspectives from paleogenetics (ancient DNA research in particular), bioarcheology, disease ecology, and climate science into historical inquiry. She is the editor of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA).