DETROIT – Wayne State University has announced its 2021 Urban One Health Symposium, Urban Environmental Stressors as Determinants of Health and Resilience. The virtual symposium will be held Dec. 2 and 3 and will feature local and international speakers. Attendees will include academic researchers; educators; public health practitioners; urban planners; medical, environmental law and engineering professionals; representatives from government agencies and community organizations; infectious disease experts; social scientists; veterinary health professionals; communicators; and students and trainees.

One Health is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a collaborative, multisectoral and transdisciplinary approach that works at the local, regional, national and global levels to achieve optimal health outcomes that recognize the interconnection between people, plants, animals and their shared environment.

The symposium organizers commented that Detroit and its sister cities around the world face unprecedented challenges related to local, regional and global environmental pressures.

“One Health urban environmental solutions are very critical now if we are ever to discover the path that leads to environmental health and ecosystem resilience for all of us,” said Melissa Runge-Morris, M.D., director of Wayne State’s Institute of Environmental Health Sciences/Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors (IEHS/CURES) and of the CURES P30 NIEHS-funded environmental health sciences core center. “In order to have successful public health interventions as we fight health issues related to human-animal-environment interfaces, teams of experts in these and other disciplines must come together to assess public health threats and learn more about how diseases spread between people, animals and our environment. This two-day conference is an opportunity to not only educate participants, but also create new strategic partnerships to develop purposeful coordinated action.”

The symposium agenda includes two keynote speakers: Colin Basler, D.V.M. and M.P.H., deputy director of the One Health Office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Peter Fiske, Ph.D., executive director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation and director of the Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Early career investigators (postdocs and assistant professors) are invited to submit abstracts for a session of short Flash Talks.

“The Flash Talks are five minutes in length and will be geared toward communicating science to a broad interdisciplinary audience,” said Carol Miller, Ph.D., professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of Wayne State’s Healthy Urban Waters initiative. “The talks are an excellent opportunity for young scientists to build collaborations with others interested in One Health.”

Abstracts are due Nov. 15.

To register for the conference or submit an abstract, visit go.wayne.edu/onehealth.

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About Wayne State University

Wayne State University is one of the nation’s pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approaclthh to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit research.wayne.edu.