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 Dr. Rachel Lowe

Dr Rachel Lowe is an Associate Professor and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She leads a group of researchers working between the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases and the Centre on Climate Change & Planetary Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She obtained a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Exeter (PhD Thesis: Spatio-temporal modelling of climate-sensitive disease risk: towards an early warning system for dengue in Brazil). Alongside her PhD, she was a Network Facilitator for the Leverhulme Trust funded project EUROBRISA: a EURO-BRazilian Initiative for improving South American seasonal forecasts. During the project, she collaborated with climate scientists and public health experts in Brazil, which resulted in her continuing participation in the Brazilian Climate and Health Observatory. She held postdoctoral positions at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, and the Catalan Institute for Climate Sciences (IC3) in Barcelona, Spain, working at the interface of climate prediction science and public health decision-making. She has published high impact research on modelling of climate-sensitive disease risk, with a focus on climate-driven dengue early warning systems in Latin America and the Caribbean and South East Asia. In 2018, she won the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases (ISNTD) Water Award for Research, in recognition of her research on the linkages between hydrometeorological extremes and dengue outbreaks and the multi-sectoral relevance for policy and practice. She has recently become the Executive Director of the Lancet Countdown in Europe. In 2022 she will join the Barcelona Supercomputing Center as an ICREA Research Professor.