Biographical Information (My Life)

 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 has finished writing (2009) the third edition of her textbook Medical Geography with colleague Professor Emch.