2025 Cohort of HGHI-Salata Burke Climate and Health Fellows

Dr. Fabian Reitzug is an epidemiologist and social scientist as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He holds a doctorate in Population Health from the University of Oxford, where his research focused on the environmental epidemiology of schistosomiasis, a major waterborne parasitic disease affecting 250 million people globally. In collaboration with the Uganda Ministry of Health, he combined individual-level GPS mobility data, remote sensing, survey data, and clinical data to study the fine-scale human-environmental drivers of schistosome transmission in fishing communities on Lake Albert and Lake Victoria. Findings from his research have been shared with local communities, the Ugandan parliament, practitioners, and academics. Following the devastating flooding that affected Ugandan communities in 2021–22, he developed a growing interest in studying the intersection between climate change and health, which he began to pursue with the support of a Soulsby One Health Fellowship award. 

As an HGHI-Salata Burke Climate and Health Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Reitzug collaborates with Prof. Matthew H. Bonds at Harvard Medical School and the global health NGO Pivot to understand the impacts of extreme weather events in rural Madagascar, with the aim of improving disaster response through local solutions. 

Prior to starting his doctorate, Dr. Reitzug worked as a consultant at the World Bank Group in Senegal for three years, where he was a Carlo Schmid Fellow. He holds an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation from the University of Oxford and a B.A. from Sciences-Po Paris. 

Project Title: “The Role of Community Health Workers in Mitigating the Health Effects of Climate Change in Rural Madagascar”

Project Description: Rural communities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face disproportionate risks from climate change. Community health workers (CHWs) provide essential health services, of particular importance for poor rural households who are vulnerable to natural disasters. However, the role of CHWs in reducing climate vulnerability through disaster preparation and response, and resilience-building is underexplored. This study uses cyclone-prone areas in rural Madagascar as a case study to investigate the potential of CHWs to reduce climate-related morbidity and mortality. Drawing upon survey data, community-based vital records, and remote sensing data, this project will (1) quantify the population-level health impacts of extreme weather events, (2) identify how CHWs respond before, during and after extreme weather events, and (3) assess the impacts of training programmes on the effectiveness of CHWs’ responses. As part of this project, I will develop advanced statistical and computational methods to address these questions. The findings will inform strategies for the Madagascar Ministry of Public Health and the NGO, Pivot, for building climate-resilient health systems and community-centred approaches for addressing climate change impacts in LMICs. 

Thalia Viveros-Uehara, PhD, is a legal scholar whose work examines the intersection of climate change, public health, and human rights. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Petrie Flom Center at Harvard Law School. Trained as a lawyer at the University of Veracruz, she pursued graduate studies in environmental policy and regulation at the London School of Economics and in international human rights law at the European University Institute. Her interdisciplinary formation underpins a research agenda focused on legal responses to structural inequality, with particular attention to the health dimensions of climate change. 

She earned her PhD in Global Inclusion and Social Development from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her dissertation—developed in residence at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and supported by a SERA–Law and Society Association Dissertation Grant—was among the first to systematically analyze how Latin American courts engage the right to health in the context of climate litigation. Her work interrogates the extent to which legal mobilization can address unequal exposure to climate-related hazards and health vulnerabilities compounded by uneven access to healthcare. 

Dr. Viveros-Uehara is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tilburg University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. She has held research affiliations with the Global Health and Rights Project at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School and the Centre on Law and Social Transformation in Norway. Her research has resulted in a wide range of publications on climate change and environmental law and policy, socio-legal approaches to vulnerability and the energy transition.  

As a 2025 HGHI–Salata Burke Fellow, she will examine how emerging climate litigation in the Global South engages with social determinants of health, and explore context-sensitive approaches to legal argumentation and interpretation grounded in constitutionalism, human rights law, and principles of health equity. 

Project Title: “Litigating the Invisible: Climate Change and Health in the Global South”

Project Description: Climate change is increasingly recognized as a public health emergency, yet legal and policy frameworks often neglect the complex social determinants that mediate its health impacts—particularly in Global South jurisdictions marked by structural inequality, systemic exclusion, and limited access to healthcare, housing, and education. While climate litigation has recently emerged as a salient strategy for accountability, its capacity to engage with these interlocking vulnerabilities has yet to be fully explored in theory and practice. 

This project examines the extent to which climate litigation in the Global South engages with the health-related consequences of climate change. It analyzes how affected communities and litigants frame health claims, how courts respond to them, and which normative frameworks and doctrinal tools are invoked or left aside in addressing the socio-legal conditions associated with health vulnerability. Particular attention is given to how climate-related health impacts—especially those compounded by adverse social determinants—are rendered (in)visible within litigation processes. The project interrogates how and why such patterns may reflect both the potential and the limitations in legal mobilization and adjudication in confronting intersecting dimensions of structural inequality. 

Situated at the intersection of comparative constitutional law, global health, development studies, and post-colonial theory, the project adopts an interdisciplinary methodology that combines legal doctrinal analysis with contextual and qualitative approaches. It advances an original conceptual framework that theorizes climate litigation as a contested arena for health justice, shaped by transnational power asymmetries and institutional constraints. 

The project contributes to both scholarly and practitioner communities by exploring possible legal strategies to more effectively integrate social determinants of health into climate adjudication. Through the HGHI–Salata Burke Fellowship platform, it seeks to foster cross-sectoral and regional dialogue and support more equitable and context-sensitive approaches to climate litigation in structurally marginalized settings. 

Timothy A. Downing is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Nairobi’s Institute for Climate Change and Adaptation. He has two master’s degrees: one from the University of Eldoret in Forestry and Wood Science (2016), and one from the University of Minnesota in Natural Resources Science and Management (2010). He also received his bachelor’s degree from Brown University in Environmental Science (2005). His PhD at the University of Nairobi (2023) looked at impacts of climate change in the alpine moorlands of Kenya- examining biophysical changes and effects on surrounding local communities. Timothy has also worked for 7 years with the US Forest Service- in New Mexico and in Washington State- as a GIS Specialist and Landscape Ecologist. He has been engaged as a research fellow at the University of Nairobi since 2022, focusing on Nature-based Solutions, and he is also serving as the Nairobi hub coordinator for the Africa Research Universities Alliance centre of excellence on Climate and Development (ARUA-CD). Most recently Timothy has developed an interest in the health aspects of climate change and has been involved in writing proposals looking at direct impacts of climate change on human health. 

Project Title: “Setting the groundwork for implementing Community Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies in urban Informal Settlements of Kenya (HATS- RISK)”

Project Description: There is an urgent need to understand and quantify health impacts of climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, one of the areas most susceptible to climate change. Urban informal settlements stand out as particularly at risk, given the urban heat island effect, coupled with high population densities, poor ventilation, and multi-dimensional poverty. Large, granular datasets are needed to show the extent of heat exposure in these communities and shed light on the mechanisms for how heat impacts health. Wearable technology has come to the fore as an innovative way to collect such data, as it can provide detailed, continuous data of the climate conditions actually experienced by humans. The chief challenge with wearables has been in implementation, as carrying out an investigation at a scale adequate to capture statistically significant data is challenging in resource-poor contexts. Existing efforts have shown that for such studies to be successful, the pre-work component is essential: on-the-ground organization, institutional partnerships, local-buy in, and data collection logistics. There also needs to be robust systems in place for data management, and a mechanism in place to translate findings into concrete policies and practices. This study proposes to carry out the groundwork to implement a heat-stress study using wearables in urban informal settlements throughout Kenya. This study would set the stage to implement Harvard University’s Community HATS (Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies) protocol within urban informal settlements in Kenya. The goal is to set up all the necessary partnerships and permits, build initial buy in from the local communities, demonstrate the feasibility of wearables in this environment, and generate context specific research questions for heat stress in these settlements.