Editors-in-Chief
Pierre Horwitz
Pierre Horwitz is the Professor of Environmental Sciences at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, and founding Co-Director of the University’s Strategic Research Centre for People, Place & Planet. He has research interests and expertise in the links between sustainable water resource management, ecosystems, biodiversity, and health, with research projects based in Western Australia, South East Asia and Oceania. He was a theme coordinator for wetlands and health for the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (2009-2015), and has supervised to completion more than 40 PhD and Masters by Research students.
Sera Young
Sera Young is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She is also the co-Directer for the Center for Water and the Morton O. Schapiro Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.
Young has dedicated her career to understanding how women, especially in low-resource settings, cope to preserve their health and that of their families. After her BA in Cultural Anthropology (U of Michigan), she pursued an MA in Medical Anthropology (U of Amsterdam), where she studied maternal anemia in Zanzibar, Tanzania. For her PhD in International Nutrition (Cornell) she returned to observations about anemia in Zanzibar: that anemic women craved earth, raw starch and other non-food substances (pica). During her post-doctoral and faculty positions at University of California Berkeley, Davis, and San Francisco, she was involved with a number of studies pertaining to HIV, food insecurity, and infant feeding in sub-Saharan Africa.
Her current research is focused on quantifying human experiences with problems with water, and unpacking their consequences for nutrition, health, and well-being. To that end, she led a large team in the development of the Water InSecurity Experiences (WISE) Scales, the first globally equivalent way of measuring water access and use (www.WISEscales.org). The WISE Scales have been used by hundreds of organizations in more than 90 countries.
She has co-authored more than 180 peer-reviewed publications and been funded by many national and international agencies. Her most recent accolade is a medal from the Director of Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health, the inaugural “Public Health Champion Award”, which she accepted on behalf of the Water Insecurity Experiences Network of Latin America and the Caribbean for their work on measuring water security. Other recognitions include the Margaret Mead Award for her book Craving Earth, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, the Norman Kretchmer Memorial Award in Nutrition and Development, and the Scrimshaw Mid-Career Award in Global Nutrition.
Founding Editor-in-Chief
Jenna Davis
Jennifer (“Jenna”) Davis (MPH, PhD) is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Higgins-Magid Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, both of Stanford University. With a background in public health, infrastructure planning, and environmental science & engineering, Davis works at the interface of engineered infrastructure systems and their users, particularly in the water sector of low- and middle-income countries. With her research group Davis has conducted fieldwork in more than 20 countries, developing and testing strategies to stimulate investment in and enhance long-term sustainability of water supply and sanitation services from the household to the national scale. Other research quantifies the economic and health impacts of service improvements and identifies the conditions under which such benefits are maximized. Davis served on the Millennium Development Goal task force for water and, more recently, on the Sustainable Development Goal team for sanitation. At Stanford, she teaches courses in environmental health engineering and interdisciplinary research design, and also directs the Stanford Program on Water, Health & Development.