Oceans and Human Health Symposium and Workshop: Accomplishments and Future Directions

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The urgency of the Oceans and Human Health (OHH) discipline grows daily as the world's population increases and continues to migrate to the coastal zone, at the same time that climate change threatens to impose varied disasters on that coastal zone. The unknowns surrounding the coastal zone and climate change have elevated the general issue of OHH to the level of a national security threat in the United States. Five years ago the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Environmental Health Science (NIEHS) cooperated to fund four national centers of Oceans and Human Health research. Each NSF-NIEHS center was tasked to actively pair biomedical scientists with ocean scientists in the pursuit of answers to scientific questions arising at the interface of these two previously separate areas of inquiry. We have now reached the point where we should synthesize the knowledge we have gained over the past five years, identify the most important discoveries, and attempt to describe areas in which future oceans and human health research would be most productive.With support from this award, researchers at the University of Miami will convene an Oceans and Human Health Symposium and Workshop to review and discuss in a comprehensive and synthetic way what has been accomplished over the past five years by the four NSF-NIEHS Centers and what the new discipline of OHH could accomplish over the next decade. The meeting is scheduled for April, 2010, in Washington, DC.The meeting agenda will be built around two general foci: OHH advances to-date and future challenges. Topics for the OHH advances portin will include: (1) direct human microbial health hazards in recreational marine waters; (2) ocean food web health hazards; (3) modeling and prediction of Harmful Algal Blooms; and (4) interdisciplinary training. The future challenges portion will include: (1) climate change; (2) natural disasters; (3) coastal impacts; and (4) nterdisciplinary training.Broader Impacts: This symposium/workshop will provide a venue for research networking and collaborative interactions not only between current Center researchers and students, but also among other researchers, science administrators, and policy makers in multiple federal agencies and other organizations in the expanding the OHH community. This will also be an opportunity for all participants to assess the relative advantages and disadvantages of a centers-oriented approach to federally supported OHH research.