Evolution is largely absent from medical, veterinary, and public health training, yet it is vital to tackling our most urgent health challenges. Evolutionary medicine addresses this need for interdisciplinary approaches by applying evolutionary perspectives on human vulnerability to disease, while also considering how evolutionary approaches can improve health and reduce suffering.
Every year, the Evolutionary Medicine Summer Institute (EMSI) advances research in a frontier of evolutionary medicine. We provide training in the methods that are needed to address cutting edge questions in that frontier. We also provide networking opportunities, including networking with experts in the focal area and with other scientists and trainees. Importantly, EMSI also advances research in the topic itself through group-level activities that lead to new research outputs. EMSI is organized by TriCEM and 11 other evolutionary medicine center programs and centers. In all of our activities, participants gain experience with collaboration and team science.
For 2026, EMSI will focus on Climate Change and Health
The workshop will be held from May 11-15 at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. You can apply for the workshop here. Applications are due by March 18.
We are grateful for support from:
- The Duke Global Health Institute’s “Climate and Global Health Initiative“
- Duke’s Climate Commitment
- Evolutionary Studies at Vanderbilt University
- The Center for Evolutionary Medicine at Arizona State University
- The Triangle Center for Evolutionary Medicine (TriCEM), funded by the Provost’s Office at Duke
We are also grateful for space from the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and planning partnership with Duke Global Health.
What will we do at the workshop in 2026?
As a group, we will work towards creating a structured toolkit to study climate change and health in a community, with a focus on rural, agricultural communities around the world. We will develop skills and a protocol that engages with climate modeling, geographic information systems, wearables, ecological field methods such as insect monitoring, causal inference, and survey instruments. We will also engage with participatory research, recognizing that research in communities requires collaboration and engagement with those communities and the health issues that are important to them.
Following the workshop, we will publish a paper sharing the outcomes from the workshop and the methods that we produced. In addition, participants will have opportunities to implement the structured toolkit in different populations, including internationally (subject to funding availability). These field studies will both help to finalize the workshop, and will provide crucial comparative data on how climate change is influencing health around the world. With the toolkit published, we aim for this workshop to also grow that comparative database.
We hope you will consider applying to join us at EMSI!
In 2025, EMSI focused on, “Overcoming Resistance: Harnessing Evolution to control Cancer, Infectious Diseases, and Pests.“
EMSI 2024!
