For more than two decades, Brown School Professor Lora Iannotti’s work has focused on nutrition around the world, from a study of wild foods in Madagascar to an intervention aimed at feeding fish to more children in Kenya. Her new job title is certainly a mouthful, but it signifies important work that she believes will help carry public health to a new level at Washington University in St. Louis.
Iannotti has been named the first Director for Planetary Health and Environmental Justice at the new Center for the Environment at the university. The center will focus on biodiversity, planetary health, environmental justice, and environmental solutions with two underlying themes of earth systems and climate change as part of the university’s effort to elevate research and action in critical environmental domains. It will play a key role in “Here & Next,” the university’s strategic vision, and in the university’s plans to create a new school of public health, which it hopes to launch next year.