Sadie J. Ryan, Medical Geographer, University of Florida, April 11, 2025
Good evening. First, I would like to take a moment to congratulate the new spring 2025 initiates on their election to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most prestigious honorary society in the United States. Phi Beta Kappa recognizes and underscores your high academic achievement and a scholarly path demonstrating interest in a wide range of disciplines in the liberal arts. I would like to also congratulate you, their parents and guests. Initiates, please take this moment to applaud those who helped you get here, whether they are sharing this evening with us in person, or not.
When I was asked if I would accept the honour of giving you this charge, my first thought was wow, how exciting to talk to such a motivated and wonderfully well-rounded group of liberal arts folks! I then thought, wow, it’s 2025, and the end of spring semester, I don’t think anyone wants me talking at them at this point, let alone pontificating and giving them obligations. When I graduated from my liberal arts college, we were told to go forth in service of the nation. I had no idea what that meant for me; I had a degree, and a curious mind, and now a strange sense of obligation to uphold. So, I will try to keep this moderately brief and hopefully leave you with a sense of the superpowers you have gained and will take with you on your journeys.
The first superpower I will mention in passing is that in navigating a degree across disciplinary boundaries, and at a large public university, you have gained skills in management. Management of forms, of bureaucracies, of strange maps of Turlington, of music buildings, of museums, of course sections in basements, of gothic buildings with room numbers that make no sense, of libraries, log-ins and course scheduling – you know words like modality and authentication, a hybrid is not just a biology term or even a car to you. Truly you have thrived amongst and in spite of the turmoil of the backdrop of a world emerging from pandemic lockdown, and rushing headlong into the AI revolution. This has made you nimble and adaptable, even before you tackled the first assignment each semester. This set of absurdly practical skills will carry you forward, unafraid to tackle new systems out there, ready to unpack and make sense of the world.
You have also been learning, and not just learning, but learning how to learn in new ways. This is not a riddle; from the moment we pop into this world, we learn – in order to survive, to communicate – and we keep learning. Did you know that studies have found that the first cries of a newborn share syntax and tonalities of the parents’ language groups? Comparing first cries across multiple language groups around the world takes a mix of disciplines – probably linguistics, biological anthropology, perhaps maternal-child studies too. Folks with multidisciplinary training learn how to learn in new ways, to access learning traditions across arts, sciences, humanities, and more – and we think outside the box, we find collaborators to broaden our ability to ask questions, because we are trained to, and this leads to exciting new things! This is your next superpower that will serve you for life – learning how to learn new things.
Tied to this is another superpower, the art of communicating across disciplines; you have synthesized knowledge across fields, and whether you made a cool map for a GIS project, wrote a research paper, created education materials, gave a talk or a presentation, you are, by this excellent training, great multidisciplinary communicators.
To expand on this a little, I want to tell you a little about my own adventures across disciplines. My work has recently been focused on understanding and planning for climate sensitive diseases. I’m a medical geographer, which is something I hadn’t heard of when I was asked to try out for the job a decade or so ago – I was an interdisciplinary ecologist of some kind, with some anthropology training, working on some animal conservation projects, and some mosquito-borne disease projects, and thinking about how humans on the landscape interact with all of these, and what kinds of frameworks and quantitative models best explain them, so we can plan better for the future. I was working on endangered frogs and rabbits in the Northeast, primate conservation and crop raiding impacts on human livelihoods in Uganda, social-ecological systems of dengue and mosquitoes in Ecuador, and no-one blinked when I wrote pieces on forest management policy, or published standards for bloodwork in veterinary journals. I was pulling on multiple disciplinary pieces to answer system level questions, chipping away at different aspects, and gently learning more and more new things.
When I came to UF, I started getting more interested in how we can talk about the climate drivers of things like mosquito-borne diseases, and as you all know, we are in the midst of a global climate crisis, which has also led to a climate-health crisis. Shifting climates lead to shifting climate-sensitive diseases; mosquitoes are moving to new places, bringing mosquito-borne diseases to unexposed populations, and we are seeing sky-rocketing numbers in outbreaks of diseases like dengue, a viral fever known as ‘breakbone’ fever, which can keep people out of the workforce for weeks, and severe cases can lead to hemorrhagic fever, sometimes with lethal consequences. Last year there were a record 13 million cases in the Americas, and while most of the cases we see in the US are travel cases, we have had small local outbreaks repeatedly over the past decade, and we have already had locally transmitted dengue in Florida this year, in March.
The urgency of understanding diseases like dengue came into sharp focus during a previous pandemic, Zika, which many of you may remember from a decade ago – a disease very closely related to dengue, transmitted by the same mosquito, but with some horrifying consequences for newborns – which left us with a legacy of ‘tip and toss’ campaigns for water-holding containers around the household, and a greater awareness of mosquito bites and the potential health problems, not just mosquitoes as nuisance issues. So why talk about this? In a changing world, these diseases are also changing – moving to new places, facilitated by climate and human processes, and we now know enough about the biology to be able to project how these changes might occur on the landscape. Yes, I take mathematical disease models, combine them with climate models, and make maps of them to communicate where we might anticipate they will show up next, and then we can mix this with demography, and think about how many people this affects, now and in the future. Here’s where it gets even more multidisciplinary – we can work with people making decisions in the real world, thinking about how to plan, what resources to allocate, to hospitals, to vector control district spray teams, to community educators, and by reaching out, asking people “what decisions can you make, and what evidence do you need to present to policy makers?” we can tailor our modeling approaches to have real utility.
People have now given this type of partnering beyond the academy names like “transdisciplinary science” and are talking about co-creation and co-design within systems thinking frameworks – even studying them and publishing about them in academic journals. I think it takes a liberal arts background to be able to think about multiple facets of the problem, and to understand not just the biological system, but the embedded context of people, both with decision-making abilities, and those who will be affected by the system and by the decisions. One of my most unlikely moments happened several years ago, when USAID had got me on a contract to develop mapping tools for informing malaria intervention planning under different climate scenario projections, and I was summoned to DC to talk about the project.
Now, many of you are probably aware that much of decision making is based on executive briefs and summaries, a very different type of information presentation style than a mathematical modeler who likes to show maps and graphs to people. There I was in the room, presenting the methods, the outcomes, and fitting that into their definitions for when to do interventions or shift strategies, making it very clear that I was not an economist, but could give them information to make the economic calculations – let me remind you, this is an agency that made multi-billion dollar global health investments, so I was being as cautious as possible while giving them my best science – and watching the lightbulb moments as I walked them through the maps and graphs was an extraordinary experience.
There are a few messages in here for you. I hope I have made it clear that the capacity to draw from multiple disciplines and communicate across them is a super power you now have, and will continue to hone, because exactly nobody will tell you not to. You will always have that to draw on, and people will call you a polymath, a problem solver, a facilitator, a great educator, a creative mind; and I hope you smile every time, and think of me waving my arms at graphs and maps in front of a room full of suits in DC, desperate to help bring the best science to important decisions.
Next, and I apologize that this goes on another side quest for a moment, but when people see me give talks at conferences, and I show how much shifting and increasing areas of the world we expect to experience changing disease risks, they’ll ask me things like “isn’t is so depressing to work on this? aren’t you just suffering doom and gloom all the time?” to which my answer is no, I’m bringing the tools I can to tackle the problem. Climate anxiety is real, and scare tactics are not what we need at this point. We know how to manage these diseases, and now we know where to put the resources; we need to be adapting to this changing world while we sort out mitigating that change. Using multidisciplinary tools empowers us, it gives us back our agency in facing seemingly inevitable global trends. Your liberal arts training is essential to facing some of the biggest and frankly overwhelming challenges of our time and you can channel those superpowers into re-taking agency and empowering yourself and others. Is it hard? Yes. Is it worth it? So much so.
Thus, in closing, I want to just remind you all that your journey through the disciplines was surely a journey of curiosity, a drive to learn new things, and in doing so you gained not just knowledge, but ways of knowing. My research group’s motto is Be Kind, and do Good Science, and in that spirit, I charge you all to be kind, stay curious, keep learning, and use your superpowers for good.
Congratulations again!