05 Jun 2023

Reconsidering ‘One Health’ Through Microbes

Explore how microbiome research links social equity and One Health, envisioning collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to human and environmental well-being.

Microbes and Social Equity concepts are based on the idea that microbes connect individuals, societies, and ecosystems. One Health & the Environment concepts are based on similar ideas of connectivity. This session will explore the connections between MSE and One Health, how microbiome research connects to One Health, and how we can broaden our own research to include other disciplines. The primary goals for this session are 1) to convene researchers in multiple disciplines and envision ways to work together, and 2) to collaboratively generate definitions of One Health & the Environment with respect to microbiomes.

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Dr. Rob Beiko, PhD., is a Professor and Head of the Algorithms and Bioinformatics research cluster in the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University. His research aims to understand microbial diversity and evolution using machine learning, phylogenetics, time-series algorithms, and visualization techniques. His group is developing software tools and pipelines to comprehensively survey genes and mobile genetic elements in bacterial genomes, and understand how these genomes have been shaped by vertical inheritance, recombination, and lateral gene transfer. He is also a co-founder of Dartmouth Ocean Techonlogies, Inc., a developer of environmental DNA sampling devices.

Dr. Marta Scaglioni, PhD. is a Cultural Anthropologist and holds a PostDoc position at Cà Foscari University of Venice (Italy) within the frame of the ERC Project HealthXCross. She is interested in how microbiome research operates in the African continent and how microbial data, knowledge, and funding travel across national boundaries and across a Global North/Global South axis.

Dr. Lucilla Barchetta, PhD., is a Cultural Anthropologist and PhD in Urban Studies. She currently works as Postdoctoral Fellow within the ERC project Health X Cross based at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, where she studies One Health epistemologies and open data governance in multidisciplinary data-centric science and collaboration.