This event, hosted by the FPH Sustainable Development SIG, will provide attendees with a deeper understanding of the key evidence on the impacts of extreme heat on health – including assessing risk, pathways to harm, and maternal outcomes – so public health professionals can apply it in their roles.
You will be hearing from:
- Professor Rajat Gupta
- Mike Davies
- Sari Kovats
- Dr. Ross Thompson
- Professor Sanjay Sisodiya
You can download the agenda here.
A short biography note of the speakers is available below.
Professor Rajat Gupta is the Director of the multi-disciplinary Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD) and the Low Carbon Building Research Group at Oxford Brookes University. He holds a senior professorial chair in sustainable architecture and climate change. Rajat’s research focuses on decarbonising the building sector through energy efficiency, renewable energy, and smart energy systems; local energy mapping for scaling up energy retrofits; and climate change adaptation, with an emphasis on monitoring and modelling the risk of building overheating. As Principal Investigator, Rajat has secured over £20 million in research funding from UK Research Councils (EPSRC, ESRC, NERC, MRC), Innovate UK, and the EU to explore these areas. He is currently leading and collaborating on several UKRI-funded research initiatives focused on indoor environments and heat resilience for vulnerable populations. Rajat is also advising Ministry of Justice (MoJ) on building overheating and has served as an ad hoc member of DEFRA’s Air Quality Expert Group. He is one the Directors of the international Passive and Low Energy Architecture (PLEA) network.
Mike Davies is Professor of Building Physics and Environment at University College London (UCL). His research interests lie in the provision of healthy and comfortable built environments in the context of a changing climate. He was the founding Director of the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering and a member of the UK Climate Change Committee from 2018-2024. For over 15 year he has led an extensive programme of research, founded on intimate collaboration with researchers from health and other disciplines, which has sought to understand the complex relationship between the built environment and human well-being. Via this body of work he has helped articulate the multiple underpinning connections and opportunities for healthy sustainable development.
Sari Kovats is an Associate Professor at LSHTM. She has a PhD in environmental epidemiology and led several research projects on the effects of heat on maternal and child health, and climate change risk assessment. Sari has contributed to national and international assessments of the health impacts of climate change.
Dr. Ross Thompson recently completed a PhD in Public Health and Policy at London School of Hygiene and Topical Medicine exploring individual-level risk factors associated with increased risk of mortality during episodes of heat. He currently leads the work within UKHSA on the continued improvement of surveillance approaches and reporting of the observed impacts during adverse weather events and the development, as well as on-going improvement of the Weather-Health Alerting system operated by UKHSA in partnership with the Met Office. Ross has a strong technical and operational background in environmental science specialising in epidemiology, climate change and sustainability. He has considerable experience responding to public health incidents, developing public health advice and guidance, providing education on the health impacts of high impact weather and climate change to both students and professionals.
Professor Sanjay Sisodiya studied medicine at the University of Cambridge and Guy’s Hospital, and trained in Neurology in Oxford and at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. He was awarded a PhD for working in brain magnetic resonance imaging in epilepsy and has made major contributions to epilepsy genetics, epilepsy pharmacogenetics. He is Professor of Neurology at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, Consultant Neurologist at the UCLH National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, and Director of Genomics at the Epilepsy Society. He runs specialist epilepsy clinics, including an epilepsy genomics clinic, for the evaluation and management of epilepsy in adults.
