Can lessons learned from the environmentalism movement seeking to protect the physical environment be applied to attempts to protect the online information environment?
In recent decades, fires, floods, and natural disasters have highlighted the deterioration of the physical environment and the risk it poses to human health if there is no intervention to preserve it. Analogously, the COVID-19 pandemic drew attention to the degradation of the online information environment, and highlighted the opportunity for a global move to protect the online information environment. When COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, there was a sharp increase in false and misleading information online. The danger of unregulated misinformation cannot be underestimated: it created mistrust in healthcare experts, inhibited frontline efforts to combat the disease, and created global political upheaval.
My two-part thesis builds upon the seminal work of James Boyle and Robert Cunningham that recognizes that lessons learned from the work of environmentalists to advocate for the protection and health of the physical environment can also be applied by ‘information environmentalists’ to protect the online environment.
Read here: Information Environmentalism Antidotes To The Infodemic
The science behind Sexual Health
My work in the Tropini Lab at UBC evaluated how the gut microbiota is involved in modulating levels of sex steroids in the circulation. We are excited about how our findings are paving the way for innovative approaches to sexual health and disease prevention.
Read more here: Science behind sexual health