Christopher D. Golden
Christopher Golden is an ecologist, professor, and epidemiologist who studies how environmental change affects human health. He looks at global biodiversity loss and how transformations in ecosystems impact people.
Born in 1982 in Cohasset, Massachusetts, he earned a BA in Environmental Conservation from Harvard College and an MPH in Epidemiology from UC Berkeley, then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Since 1999, he has conducted ecological and public health research in Madagascar, focusing on how local people rely on natural resources for health.
Golden leads a research program that links fisheries management, ocean governance, climate change, food security, and nutrition in coastal communities around the world, including a National Science Foundation study in Kiribati. He is an Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Planetary Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, teaching across the Nutrition, Environmental Health, and Global Health and Population departments.
He is a Lifetime Fellow of the Explorer’s Club and a National Geographic Explorer and Fellow, and appeared in the documentary Virus Hunters. He serves on scientific advisory boards for Oceana, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Periodic Table of Foods Initiative, and the IUCN Species Survival Commission. Golden founded Madagascar Health and Environmental Research (MAHERY) in 2004 to train Malagasy researchers in planetary health, the study of how environmental change affects health. In 2014, National Geographic named him an Emerging Explorer.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 06:53 (CET).