Health and Climate Change in Europe

Prof. Rachel Lowe, Director

Rachel Lowe is an ICREA Research Professor, Global Health Resilience Team Leader at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and Director of the Lancet Countdown in Europe. She also holds a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Rachel’s research focuses on co-developing policy-relevant methodological solutions, to enhance surveillance, preparedness and response to climate-sensitive disease outbreaks and emergence. She has published high impact research on integrating seasonal climate forecasts in early warning systems for infectious diseases in Latin America, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. In 2018, she won the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases Water Award for Research, in recognition of the quality of her research on the linkages between hydrometeorological extremes and dengue outbreaks and the multi-sectoral relevance for policy and practice. She coordinates two Wellcome Trust digital technology, climate, and health projects, HARMONIZE and IDExtremes, which aim to provide robust data and modelling tools to build local resilience against emerging infectious disease threats in climate change hotspots. She is the co-coordinator of the Horizon Europe project IDAlert, which aims to tackle the emergence and transmission of zoonotic pathogens by developing novel indicators and innovative early warning systems to strengthen Europe’s resilience to emerging health threats.

Dr. Kim van Daalen, Research Fellow

Kim van Daalen is a post-doctoral researcher at the BSC Global Health Resilience team focusing on climate change, infectious disease and gender inequities, and a Lancet Countdown Research Fellow. As a Lancet Countdown Research Fellow, she coordinates the Lancet Countdown in Europe collaboration together with Prof. Rachel Lowe. Kim is also an honorary fellow at University College London (UCL) for her work on the Lancet Migration. She recently finished her PhD (Dec 2022) as Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge on environmental arsenic pollution and risk of cardiovascular disease (CVDs). In 2022 she won the Bill Gates Sr. Prize for outstanding research and leadership, and in 2017 she won a Murray Edwards Public Health award to support her MPhil in Public Health. Kim has co-authored multiple peer-reviewed publications reflecting her broad research interests at the intersections of environmental epidemiology with climate change, planetary health, and (gender) inequities. On a voluntary basis she acts as a research coordinator for the international NGO Women in Global Health, and has previously been a research consultant for the World Bank.

Dr. Cathryn Tonne, Co-Director

Cathryn Tonne, Associate Professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, is an environmental epidemiologist focusing on the health effects of air pollution from traffic and household sources. She is also the Co-Director of the Lancet Countdown in Europe and leads the working group focused on mitigation actions and health co-benefits. Her research has investigated exposure patterns and health effects of air pollution in high- as well as low- and middle-income countries and the health co-benefits of climate change mitigation via air pollution. She is a member of the Expert Working Group on climate change, air pollution, and health within the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Air Pollution and Health. She led the European Research Council funded Cardiovascular Health effects of Air pollution in Telangana, India and is coordinator of CATALYSE, a Horizon Europe project focused on climate change and health.

Prof. Maria Nilsson, Chair

Prof. Maria Nilsson is a professor in public health with the orientation climate change and health at the department of Epidemiology and Global Health, Umeå University, Sweden; a social scientist who holds a PhD in epidemiology and public health sciences. She is also the Chair of the Lancet Countdown in Europe. Her main focus is climate change and health, with a specific interest in adaptation and vulnerable populations, health and risk communication and knowledge translation. She was the integrating editor for health in the 2015 "Lancet Commission - Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health" and co-leads the working group on adaptation, planning, and resilience for health in the global “Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change". She is Editor in chief for Global Health Action, an international journal publishing research in the field of global health, addressing transnational health and policy issues. She was awarded a fellowship from the Swedish Institute for Global Health Transformation (SIGHT), under the auspices of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, for global health leadership.

Prof. Josep M. Antó, Co-Chair

Josep M. Antó is a Senior Research Professor (ISGlobal) and Professor of Medicine at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain, and the Co-Chair of the Lancet Countdown in Europe. He is a respiratory physician and epidemiologist whose research has focused on the epidemiology of asthma and COPD with special interest on the environmental determinants and prevention of these diseases. He is Professor at Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal) and at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Among other leading positions, he has been the Founding Director of Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) (2005-2016) and Founding Scientific Director of ISGlobal (2016-2019). In the past years, he has been increasingly devoted to adapt environmental health strategies to the fight against climate change and to promote the concept of planetary health locally and internationally.