Climate Researchers Look for Big Ideas, Early Wins

For the growing community of Duke researchers who are studying the health impacts of climate change, one of the most pressing questions is speed: Can the traditionally slow process of academic research move fast enough to make a difference for communities that are already feeling the effects of the world’s increasingly precarious weather?

“If you talk to an implementation scientist, [they will say] it takes 17 years to get what we know into practice,” noted Catherine Staton, M.D., a professor of global health and emergency medicine, during the recent Climate and Health Big Ideas Symposium at Duke. “As we start to think what tomorrow is going to look like, we have to think about how we are going to impact our communities. What do they need most? Can we identify early wins along the process, so it’s not 17 years before we’ve implemented something?”

Staton was one of nearly a dozen DGHI researchers who participated in the symposium, a day-long event convened by the Duke School of Medicine to ignite innovative approaches to address the growing health impacts of climate change. Held on Jan. 22 in Duke’s Mary Trent Semand Center for Health Education, the conference drew faculty, researchers and students from across Duke to discuss ongoing research, foster interdisciplinary connections and brainstorm new ideas. 

“It’s easy to put climate change and health together at a place like Duke,” said Mary Klotman, M.D., executive vice president for health affairs at Duke and dean of the School of Medicine, during welcoming remarks at the symposium. “It’s always to me so inspiring to see how many people come to the table and really think about how they can take their expertise and apply it to whatever problem they are trying to solve. And that is exactly what we’re seeing in our climate and health initiatives."

A Global Kidney Crisis

The symposium featured research funded through the School of Medicine’s Climate and Health Research Initiative (CHERI), including several projects led by faculty and staff involved with DGHI’s own Climate and Global Health Initiative, which was launched in 2025 to facilitate equity-centered work at the intersection of climate and global health.

Among the research projects highlightedwas an effort led by DGHI researchers Nishad Jayasundara, Ph.D., and Mercedes Bravo, Ph.D., to study the impact of heat and other environmental exposures on kidney health. Jayasundara has documented a rise in chronic kidney disease among agricultural workers in Sri Lanka that is likely connected to heat stress. Exposure to hot, dry conditions reduces blood flow to the kidneys, increasing risk of injury from dehydration and other environmental contaminants, he explained. 

Bravo and Jayasundara are working to understand the risks that prolonged heat exposure may pose to kidney health among other groups, including athletes in outdoor sports, farm workers and firefighters in North Carolina. They estimate one in seven people in the U.S. may be at risk of kidney damage due to such exposures.

 “Sentinel communities are telling us a lot about what are the environmental factors that are influencing health, and the hope of this new phase for us in this research is to bring that knowledge to think about the questions in our own backyard here in North Carolina,” said Jayasundara, who is also on the faculty of the Nicholas School of the Environment.

The project is part of a wider interdisciplinary effort to study chronic kidney disease that also includes Duke nephrologist and DGHI affiliate Anna Strasma, M.D. It was announced at the symposium that Jayasundara and Bravo will receive funding to support a postdoctoral researcher through the SCALES Postdoctoral Fellows Program, an initiative of Duke’s Office of Climate and Sustainability to support early-career researchers pursuing climate-related work.

Vulnerability and Resilience

Other research presented at the symposium included a project co-led by Anna Tupetz, D.P.T., an assistant professor of emergency medicine and global health,  which is working with communities in western North Carolina affected by Hurricane Helene to address preparedness for future natural disasters and improve resilience in local healthcare systems. 

Bravo and DGHI affiliate professor Amy Corneli, Ph.D., are also part of a broad interdisciplinary team studying the impact of climate changes on the immune system. The team is aiming to identify biomarkers associated with either dysregulation in the immune system or immue resilience, which may offer a target for interventions that protect people from climate-related diseases and chronic conditions. 

Noting the overlap in topics and methods represented in many of the studies presented at the symposium, speakers emphasized the need for researchers across disciplines to collaborate and share information. Bravo said her team is looking to develop a set of standardized questions that could be added to surveys to gather general information about people’s lifestyles and behaviors that could be used across multiple studies. 

Toddi Steelman,Ph.D., Duke’s vice president for climate and sustainability, reiterated Duke’s university-wide commitment to climate action and research, noting that health is one of the three priority areas of research identified in Duke’s Climate Commitment. 

 “Climate is a force multiplier in the existing vulnerabilities we already have in society,” Steelman said. “We know that those vulnerabilities are going to be exacerbated by the impact of heat and climate and the extreme events that go along with it.”

Ideas with Impact

The symposium also featured a round of “Big Idea” pitches, which gave researchers an opportunity to lay out proposed research projects that center community engagement and solutions that can be deployed in the near term. Among the proposed ideas was a data-driven early-warning system to assess heat risks in rural North Carolina, which was presented by DGHI associate professor Joao Vissoci, Ph.D., and Jordan Clark, Ph.D., a data scientist working with DGHI’s climate initiative. The platform would be co-developed with rural communities to identify the triggers for health-endangering heat exposure and a playbook for localized public health responses. 

Other proposed ideas included a project focused on the impacts of rising heat onmental health, which is co-led by DGHI assistant professor Christine Gray, Ph.D. Jayasundara was also part of a team pitching a project to understand how populations of bacteria and other microbes in the human gut may be altered by heat exposure and other climate changes. 

“The environment plays a significant role in our health – and that is why we are seeing climate being a major driver of health outcomes,” Jayasundara said during one presentation. “That is why we need to study this in depth, and I think really prioritize research that can have implementable solutions.”

But if climate researchers hope to close the long gap between a good idea and an effective intervention in the field, one key may be involving communities earlier in the process. Co-designing research with communities can help ensure that a researcher’s findings can be implemented and sustained in the communiteis that are most affected by climate extremes, Staton noted. Engageing with community leaders can also help researchers develop useful tools and actions that can be put into place even before the research process is complete.  

“This  might not be the end of our science, but it is the first step in making that link to the community, demonstrating impact and process,” Staton said.