Description
Dr. Ben Ryan joins Cameron at GEHA 2026 on Lake Lanier, about a half hour outside Atlanta. Ryan is a professor at the Frist College of Medicine at Belmont University in Nashville, where he is putting environmental health into a brand-new medical school. He previously helped stand up a master’s of public health and environmental health program at Baylor, and he is in his first year as NEHA Region 7 representative (Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Florida).

They get into why first-year med students light up over toxicology and food safety, why an MD running a health department often has almost no environmental health training, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate of about 27,000 environmental science and occupational health jobs a year for the next decade. Ryan on the salary gap pulling people out of local government, Tennessee’s tuition package as a retention tool, and why a five-to-ten-year pipeline may be the realistic model.

Episode Timeline:
0:00  Opening and Introduction
0:22  Meet Dr. Ben Ryan
0:55  Bringing Environmental Health into Medical School
2:50  Environmental Health Careers and Workforce Demand
4:26  Recruiting and Retaining Government Professionals
5:24  What a NEHA Regional Representative Does
6:46  Teaching Future Physicians at Belmont
8:54  Why Build a Brand-New Medical School Program?
10:38  From Australia to the United States
11:52  Environmental Health in Australia vs. the U.S.
14:36  Pandemic Response and Geographic Isolation
16:58  Adapting to American Culture
18:06  NEHA Growth and the Next Generation
18:34  AI, Surveillance, and the Human in the Loop
20:12  Turning Data into Faster Public-Health Action
22:03  How Students Should Use AI
23:04  Measuring Environmental Health’s Impact
24:46  Closing Remarks

Also on the table: Australia vs. the U.S. He grew up in Canberra, trained at Griffith in Brisbane, and has been in the States about nine years. Australia is only now opening a CDC and has no National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences equivalent. Dengue, cyclones, and local environmental health officers look familiar. The pandemic timeline did not. Friends back home were still locked down while he was at a Rangers game.

They close on NEHA’s 7,000-plus members, 1,300 at the Kansas City AEC, 150 of them students, and using AI on inspection and surveillance data with a registered environmental health specialist still in the loop. Georgia’s new system lands in November. Same rule as everywhere else: storing the data is not the same as acting on it.

Beyond Data Management is powered by HS GovTech. 

Recorded live at the Lake Lanier Islands Resort for GEHA 2026.

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