Two farms, two girls in their childhood: one in Pinhalzinho, Brazil, the other in Littleton in the American Midwest, spending long hours outdoors. Now, two women converge in this conversation years later, finding common ground despite different life paths and disciplines.
Giulia Catissi, Research Nurse and PhD Student at the Albert Einstein Education and Research Center in São Paulo, and Ruth Williamson, PhD student at the University of Missouri-Columbia, had a talk about personal experience and research lines that are now actively impulsing with pioneer strength the field of nature and health.
During the IV Global Summit, Giulia and Ruth brought forward a direct, experience-driven conversation on the challenges and opportunities. Health and nature came together in their own lives, and from different starting points both are creating forceful inspiration for rigorous and spirited research.
Giulia: “What inspired me about my research path, that is the same about my personal life, is that I have always had a deep connection with nature since I grew up on my grandfather’s farm. And many of my most meaningful childhood memories are connected to those experiences. That’s why in my lectures I always say: if a person has a connection with nature, they tend to protect the environment more. You have a win, win relationship”.
“During my nursing school, I went through a huge health challenge myself when I was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. During my treatment in a private hospital near Sao Paulo where I received chemotherapy and all the treatment, there were nature images displayed in the infusion rooms. I was 18 years old. Now I’m 28. And I clearly remember how those images brought me a sense of calm and emotional comfort during such a difficult moment. These moments were life changing”.
“That’s why I continue to research and explore more about nature because I already worked with that prior to my treatment. But after my treatment, I became another Giulia”.
Ruth: “I also grew up on a farm, a Midwest farm. So I spent a lot of my time outside just connecting with nature. There weren’t a lot of people around so I just spent a lot of time exploring and curiously looking at things. And that continued to evolve as I got older and I started reading more books about nature and connecting with it in that way”.
“I have a physical disability so it’s been really impactful being able to go outside and spend time in nature throughout all sorts of random procedures that I’ve gone through. And it’s been like an anchor, and always having a view outside when I’m sick is really important to me. That nature and health connection has always been impactful for me. And so it’s really awesome to be able to research it and help other people see that as well.”
Professional Paths
Ruth: “I knew I wanted to do something that gave me the freedom to be curious but I also wanted to make an impact in the world and I wanted to help people. During my undergrad, I did Plant Science because I was curious about how plants worked. I was kind of expecting to just do molecular biology and maybe help with finding different ways that people can use plants through that”.
“The first couple weeks of undergraduate research, my PI asked me ‘Ruth, what are you passionate about?’ Like, what do you care about? And these aren’t the questions I was really expecting to be asked: I explained that I cared about people and about plants, and I wanted to see how they fit together. So he said ‘well, we can design a project to make that happen’”.
“In my PhD program, we’re building off of what we’ve done before and just continuing forward and expanding even further and saying how can we take this to the next level and involve even more people from our school in this?”
“Now I am looking at how phytoncides, the compounds that plants give off into the air, how those affect people. So we’re trying to design mouse model studies to see which phytoncides are there”.
“We’ve got research from my undergrad that shows which phytoncides are there and what their levels are. And we’re using that to design perfectly mimicked environments to the natural forest. But reducing all the variables down to just the phytoncides and taking away the site of the green space, to pick apart the different elements that you experience, because as a person, you go out and you feel all of these different sensations at once, and it’s kind of hard to figure out what’s doing what. So that’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to get that smell aspect nailed down”.
Giulia: “The experience I shared made me think that if these nature images had such a positive effect on me, how could I as a future nurse in that time bring this kind of therapeutic experience to my patient as well?
“And since then I was already involved in the research alongside my current advisor, professor Eliseth Leao. My undergraduate thesis focuses exactly on this topic. The use of scientifically validated therapeutic nature images for oncological patients. So we have the help of National Geographic photographers and we developed a database from nature images and we validated them for the whole population”.
“Using the highest ranked therapeutic images, in the pre and post intervention assessments we observed reductions in pain, fatigue, sadness, anxiety and appetite related distress. From that point on, this became the central axis of my academic and my professional journey”.
“I continue since 2016 within the same research group. First as an intern, then a research assistant, later as a master’s student and postgraduate lecturer. And today I’m a research nurse and a PhD student. Now, in my doctoral research, I’m studying how climate, environmental exposure and socioeconomic conditions are associated with neurodegenerative diseases, specifically Alzheimer’s. So I’m going to investigate some associations between environmental, climatic and socioeconomic issues. It’s more about inequities in different cities in Brazil”.
Why This Work Matters
Giulia: “My inspiration is the experience that we have with the patients and the participants in our research. We have different kinds of nature based interventions and for me, what makes sense about all the research that we do, all the planning that we do, all the search of money that we do, is to receive the responses of the participants. And I’m not talking about pre and post intervention assessment questionnaires, validated questionnaires”.
“Of course this is amazing and important. But to know about their experience, their thoughts, what they think about it, if that makes sense for them, if they got better, if they had a good relationship with the professional and with friends… So this is why, this is what makes sense for me, to understand the experience of the person who received the intervention”.
Ruth: “For me, the days when I feel ‘this is why I’m here’ are often when I get to start making those connections to like what Julia’s doing. It’s the work that I do on a machine, looking at graphs, looking at a bunch of numbers that eventually are the things that make people’s days better and improve people’s lives that maybe didn’t know that they could be improved in that way. And it’s when I start to see this is going to help Julia or another person that’s working with these people. That’s when I get really excited”.
“We have a huge responsibility on making people’s lives better but also to raise awareness about climate change. We want to connect people to nature in all different aspects. As researchers, we can connect what we do because we have a common purpose to make people’s life better and to improve the planet that we inhabit. I prefer to call it Planetary Health, as it is a cycle.”
Ph: Courtesy Giulia Catissi and Ruth Williamson
共同成长，掌握打造深度自然体验的核心技能。
