Six voices
The plenary speakers were chosen to span the field's scientific range and its geography. Their talks were the common reference points for the parallel programme.
Kalpana Balakrishnan
WHO Collaborating Centre, Chennai, India
In Chennai, Kalpana Balakrishnan leads a WHO collaborating centre that works on occupational and environmental health. Her research follows air pollution and chemical exposures from measurement to policy, with a particular interest in how rural and urban communities in low and middle income countries are exposed. She has contributed to international air quality and burden of disease assessments.
Kristie L. Ebi
University of Washington, United States
Kristie L. Ebi works on climate and health at the University of Washington, where she leads the Center for Health and the Global Environment. Her research examines heat, extreme events, food systems and vectorborne disease, and the adaptation choices that can reduce risk in different regions.
Majid Ezzati
Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Majid Ezzati holds a chair in global environmental health at Imperial College London. He directs two research centres there, one focused on global health and the other on surveillance of non communicable disease. His field work has covered air pollution in Africa and Asia, and he led the World Health Organization's comparative risk assessment.
Adetoun Mustapha
Nigerian Institute for Medical Research, Lagos
Adetoun Mustapha divides her working life between the energy sector in Nigeria and research at the Nigerian Institute for Medical Research. Her interests range from air pollution and waste to climate, green space and research ethics. She is the first chair of the ISEE Africa Chapter.
Ben Nemery
KU Leuven, Belgium
Ben Nemery spent much of his career at KU Leuven, where he built a lung toxicology research group and taught occupational medicine. His work has covered the mechanisms of lung disease caused by workplace and environmental pollutants, with a later focus on Africa. He became emeritus in 2018 but remains active in teaching and research.
Marc Weisskopf
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, United States
Marc Weisskopf works at Harvard on how environmental exposures affect the brain over a lifetime. His research covers autism, motor neuron disease, cognitive ageing, dementia and mental health, and he also writes on methods for stronger causal inference in observational studies.
Why these voices
The plenary group connected the meeting's oldest theme to its newest methods. Air pollution and climate science sat beside toxicology, global risk assessment and neuroscience. The mix reflected the programme committee's intention to keep the field open to neighbouring disciplines and to the policy questions that follow from the evidence.
Profile note The longer profiles for Kalpana Balakrishnan, Kristie L. Ebi and Majid Ezzati were prepared for this archive from the public 2019 speaker listing.
Reference shelf
- World Health Organization
- International Society for Environmental Epidemiology
- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
Links open in a new tab and lead to the current websites of the organisations named.