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Biographical Information
Professor Meade was born
in New York City and grew up and went to school and college on
Long Island, New York, at Hofstra College. She was
valedictorian of her high school and college classes, but then
changed her life by volunteering for the Peace Corps instead
of going to graduate school in history. She taught English for
two years in a small town in northeastern Thailand, six hours
by elephant from the railhead in the provincial capital, and
discovered the complexities of development and a view of the
world from another culture. She then went to graduate school,
first at Michigan State and then in the East-West Center at
the University of Hawaii, in geography to study Asia,
population change, and health promotion and disease ecology.
Her dissertation research involved two years of field work in
land development/population resettlement schemes in Malaysia
on the dimensions of population movement and effects on
disease ecology. While teaching at UCLA, at the University of
Georgia, and since 1978 at Carolina, this has been her
constant interest. She has studied health ecology and
population movement regarding topics as different as the
eradication of malaria in the U.S., the enigma area of
cardiovascular disease and stroke in the coastal plain of the
southeast as expressed in the city of Savannah, Georgia, and
the implications of the growth of megacities and the
globalization of population movement for the diffusion of
diseases and the emergence of a difference state of disease
and health ecology in the urban population of the future.
Professor Meade teaches courses from freshman
to doctoral level on issues of changing population dynamics
and structure, different disease ecologies, agricultural
modernization, urbanization, and globalization in the
developing world; on population geography, medical geography,
disease ecology, the world¡¯s food supply; and on Tropical
Asia. She is now (2007-08) writing the third edition of her
textbook Medical Geography.
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