From Polar Bears to Mosquitoes: Spotlight on Student Researcher Morgan Tarpenning

When Morgan Tarpenning was in elementary school, she was obsessed with polar bears. Naturally after discovering that climate change was threatening them, she became a staunch environmentalist. At one point, she was even sure that Terraforming Mars was her life’s calling. In eighth grade though, she discovered a new interest: human biology. She loved understanding  the body on a cellular and systemic level, but even more, she found joy in the way this knowledge could be used to care for others and make a difference in people's lives. Toward the end of high school, while driving through the mountains, Morgan saw a car veer off the road and become wedged between trees on a steep slope. She called 911 but wished she could do more. Realizing how easily any additional intervention could have worsened things due to her lack of training, she enrolled in an EMT course. She quickly fell in love with the profession and decided to spend a gap year working as an EMT.

From long transports between medical centers which allowed Morgan to connect deeply with patients to seeing firsthand how the context of a person's life influences disease and health, that year only deepened her passion for patient care. She also began to see connections between the environment and health. Intense heat waves for example, meant higher call volumes from treeless neighborhoods. Thus, she started her freshman year at Stanford knowing she wanted to go into medicine, but also that she wanted to deeply understand other fields like policy, economics, and environmental science. While at first she felt like these interests were only loosely connected, a course on “Emerging Infectious Diseases” taught by Prof. Jamie Jones introduced her to climate change’s direct consequences on disease and showed her she could pursue both her interests as an Earth Systems major and Human Biology minor.

After the course, she began working with HPH leaders Desiree LaBeaud and Joelle Rosser who were interested in vector borne disease in Africa. They’d found that trash was a habitat for dengue transmitting mosquitoes, but didn’t have high quality tools to quantify trash. In fact, the gold standard for trash quantification was walking through communities and manually noting the presence and location of trash.

 Morgan had the opportunity to go to Kenya with the lab to explore the alternatives to this sweaty, intense human labor dependent method. During her time there, she experienced first-hand how this method was not only extremely time consuming, but it wasn’t always effective, as sometimes high walls or large fences hindered people’s ability to exactly map the presence and amount of trash in an area. With the Rosser Lab—that’s supported by the Center for Human and Planetary Health—she began investigating whether images from drones, which can capture large regions in a short period of time, could be effective for trash quantification. Their multi-year project, which found that drones are more effective than manual quantification, was recently published. After graduating this June, Morgan is heading to Indonesia to understand local perspectives on trash in the city of Makassar. The goal of this work, which will be a collaboration with Indonesia’s Hasanuddin University, is to inform local strategies that reduce dengue through improved waste management. The appearance and type of trash varies between communities and so she also hopes to do a similar drone study there with the aim of assessing whether drones are a valid tool for trash quantification across multiple contexts. 

As she reflects on her time at Stanford, she’s grateful to have attended such a multidisciplinary school which allowed her to discover where her interests intersected. The foundation in systems thinking she gained from her Earth Systems coursework along with the deep understanding of economics she got from the human and environmental systems track have given her a broad foundation to take with her to medical school where she hopes to keep exploring medicine and health through interdisciplinary perspectives.