Planetary Health Alliance director to deliver commencement address

Sam Myers, MD, director of Harvard University’s Planetary Health Alliance, will deliver the commencement address at the School of Nursing spring commencement ceremony May 17. Myers is a senior research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and is board certified in internal medicine.

The School of Nursing is a member of the Planetary Health Alliance, which is a consortium of over 120 universities, NGOs, government entities and research institutes around the world committed to advancing planetary health. The alliance works with a broad array of scientific disciplines to build an evidence base for informing policy solutions aimed at optimizing both human health and environmental stewardship objectives.

“We are at an extraordinary moment in human history. Human activity is the dominant force determining biophysical conditions around the planet,” said Myers, at a lecture at the School of Nursing last year. “We need to understand the moment that we’re in and the implications of the decisions we’re making to fuel that fierce urgency of why what we do now is so important.”