School Notes: School of the Environment
May/June 2012

Environmental health expert honored

Michelle Bell, an expert on the environment and human health, has received the inaugural Prince Albert II de Monaco/ Institut Pasteur Award for outstanding contributions to her field. Bell was honored March 23 in Monaco at a scientific symposium on environmental changes and their impact on human health. Prince Albert II of Monaco and the Institut Pasteur, a nonprofit research center in Paris dedicated to the prevention and treatment of disease, established the award to honor scientists for their study of how environmental conditions affect public health. Bell came to Yale in 2004 and was promoted to professor of environmental health in 2011. She has conducted several landmark studies of environmental health, including the largest study to date of the health impacts of tropospheric ozone.

Faculty awarded named professorships

Two members of the environment school faculty have been appointed to named professorships in recognition of their outstanding contributions to scholarship. Xuhui Lee, the Sara Shallenberger Brown Professor of Meteorology, is an internationally renowned expert in the biophysics and biometeorology of natural and human-dominated ecosystems, including agricultural systems. He works on the ways radiation, water, heat, and trace gases are exchanged between the vegetation and the atmosphere, as well as how these interactions influence large-scale biogeochemical processes such as the carbon cycle.

John Wargo has been named the Tweedy/Ordway Professor of Environmental Health and Politics. His book, Our Children’s Toxic Legacy, won the American Publishers Association Prize for the best book in political science in 1998. His most recent book,Green Intelligence, published by Yale University Press in 2009, examines the history of science and law regulating pesticides, radionuclides, diesel emissions, mercury in the food chain, and plastics. As chair of the environmental studies major in Yale College, Wargo has played a key leadership role over the past decade in the design and rapid growth of the major, which has nearly tripled within the past five years.