Dhivya Arasappan

Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow

20232024 Forum on Revolution

Dhivya Arasappan

Health & Societies and Biology

CAS, 2024

Dhivya Arasappan is a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences from Berwyn, Pennsylvania. She is studying Health & Societies and Biology with a minor in Creative Writing. Dhivya comes from a multidisciplinary research background from history of medicine and anthropology to healthcare delivery and implementation science. Her work as a Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow and for her Health & Societies senior thesis specifically focuses on health-related impacts of climate change and the responses of the academic medical community, including physicians and other healthcare professionals. In her free time, Dhivya loves baking and photography. 

A Climate-Health Revolution: Examining Novel Framings of Climate Change as a Health Crisis

Since the early 2000s, public health and medical scholars have worked to develop a coordinated response to adverse health outcomes brought on by climate change. In the last ten years, there has been a surge in the number of medical and public health-related centers, degree and training programs, research journals, etc., centered on climate and health. This project seeks to map the emergence of this “climate medicine” field as traced through public health and medical school curricula, academic institutions, wide-reaching global consortiums, and journals, as well as understand how climate change has become institutionalized as a health concern. This work may reflect on the growing bounds of medicine beyond the biomedical, towards addressing the political and social systems within which the institution of medicine exists.