Meet the team: Chair Prof. Maria Nilsson

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. 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. Recently, she has also become the chair of the Lancet Countdown in Europe.

Co-Chair Josep M. Antó

Josep M. Antó is a Senior Research Professor (ISGlobal) and Professor of Medicine at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain. 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. Recently, he became the co-chair of the Lancet Countdown in Europe.

Director Prof. Rachel Lowe

Rachel Lowe is an ICREA Research Professor and Global Health Resilience Team Leader in the Earth Science Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain. Rachel obtained a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Exeter in 2011. Her thesis focused on spatiotemporal modelling of dengue epidemics in Brazil. She held postdoctoral positions at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy and the Catalan Institute for Climate Sciences, working at the interface of climate prediction science and public health decision-making. From 2016-2021 she was a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where she continues to serve on the management committee of the Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health. Rachel’s research involves modelling the impact of environmental change on infectious disease epidemics, to inform disease control and prevention strategies. She has published high impact research on modelling climate-sensitive disease risk, with a focus on integrating seasonal climate forecasts in dengue early warning systems in the Americas and Southeast Asia. In 2018, she won the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases (ISNTD) 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.