Plenary Speakers - ISEE 2019

Plenary Keynote Speakers

We’re pleased to announce the plenary keynote speakers at ISEE 2019. In alphabetical order, they are listed below.
Titles, abstracts and day of presentation will be announced in due time.

Kalpana Balakrishnan

Professor & Director, WHO CC for Occupational and Environmental Health, SRU-ICMR Center for Advanced Research on Environmental Health, Chennai, India

Professor Kalpana Balakrishnan Ph.D., FAMS, is Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, SRU-ICMR Centre for Advanced Research on Air Quality, Climate and Health, Department of Environmental Health Engineering, Faculty of Public Health at the Sri Ramachandra Institute for Higher Education and Research, Porur, Chennai – 600116, India.

Dr. Kalpana Balakrishnan obtained her undergraduate degree from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, and subsequently her doctoral and post-doctoral training at the Johns Hopkins University, USA.She is a leading global environmental health scientist in India, spearheading research and academic efforts in the areas of health effects of air pollution and chemical risk assessment. Her primary scientific contributions are centered on (i) developing novel exposure assessment approaches to characterize the complex exposures experienced by rural and urban populations in LMICs and (ii) designing and conducting strategic epidemiological investigations in India, that leverage across the national and global pools of evidence, to catalyze policy level actions.

She has contributed to several national and international technical assessments concerned with air quality including the Global Burden of Disease and Comparative Risk Assessments, The IARC Monographs, The Global Energy Assessments, The World Health Organisation Air Quality Guidelines and India State level Burden of Disease Initiative. She is also a Fellow of the National Academy Of Medical Sciences, India.

She currently serves as member of the National Steering Committee on Air Pollution Related Issues for Health Effects for the Ministry of Health Govt. of India and the Indian Council for Medical Research led National Task Force for assessment of impact of initiatives to promote clean household energy.

Kristie L. Ebi

Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE), and Rohm and Haas Endowed Professor in Public Health Sciences at the University of Washington, WA, USA

Kristie L. Ebi is director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE), and Rohm and Haas Endowed Professor in Public Health Sciences at the University of Washington.

She has been conducting research and practice on the health risks of climate variability and change for more than twenty years, including on extreme events, thermal stress, foodborne safety and security, and vectorborne diseases. She focuses on understanding sources of vulnerability, estimating current and future health risks of climate change, and designing adaptation policies and measures to reduce the risks of climate change in multi-stressor environments. She has supported multiple countries in Central America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific in assessing their vulnerability and implementing adaptation measures. She also co-chairs the International Committee On New Integrated Climate change assessment Scenarios (ICONICS), facilitating development of new climate change scenarios. Dr. Ebi’s scientific training includes an M.S. in toxicology and a Ph.D. and a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology, and two years of postgraduate research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has edited fours books on aspects of climate change and has more than 200 publications.

Majid Ezzati

Professor of Global Environmental Heath, Imperial College, London, UK

Majid Ezzati is Professor of Global Environmental Health at Imperial College London, Director of Wellcome Trust-Imperial Centre for Global Health Research, and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on NCD Surveillance and Epidemiology.

His research focuses on exposure to and health effects of environmental, behavioural, nutritional, and metabolic risk factors and their interventions, and on health inequalities. Majid and his research group have conducted field studies on air pollution in Kenya, Ghana, The Gambia, and China. He led the World Health Organization’s Comparative Risk Assessment Study, which was the first consistent global analysis of behavioural, environmental, nutritional, psychosocial, and metabolic risk factors and formed the scientific core of World Health Report 2002: Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life. Majid leads the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration () and co-leads NCD Countdown 2030 (), worldwide scientific collaborations that aim to strengthen the evidence for more effective NCD prevention and management. He is a fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.

Adetoun Mustapha

Nigerian Institute for Medical Research, Lagos, Nigeria

Adetoun Mustapha works in the energy industry in Nigeria in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 (affordable and clean energy). She is an adjunct researcher at the Nigerian Institute for Medical Research and Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Imperial College London.

Her diverse research experience includes health effects of air pollution, waste management, climate change, green space, applied ethics and her interests include environmental and public health advocacy.

She joined ISEE in 1999. She is a long-standing member of the ISEE Ethics and Philosophy Committee and coordinator of ethics sessions at annual meetings. She is the inaugural and current Chair of ISEE Africa Chapter. She was awarded the ISEE Rebecca James Baker Memorial Prize in 2010.

Ben Nemery

Emeritus Professor (Toxicology & Occupational Medicine), Faculty of Medicine, KU Leuven, Belgium

Ben Nemery is holder of degrees in medicine, occupational medicine and toxicology. He has been affiliated with the Medical Faculty of the KU Leuven since 1987. He founded the research unit of Lung Toxicology, a joint venture between the departments of Pneumology and of Occupational, Environmental and Insurance Medicine. He teaches toxicology and occupational medicine, mainly at postgraduate level. He holds a weekly outpatient clinic for occupational pulmonary disorders.

His research involves experimental as well as clinical-epidemiological studies in the mechanisms of lung disease caused by occupational and environmental pollutants. Recently he has concentrated on occupational and environmental health in the South, especially Africa. He is co-author of over 300 publications in international biomedical journals and has contributions in more than 40 books. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium and various other national and international scientific bodies, including the European Respiratory Society, where he held leadership positions.

He became an Emeritus Professor on 1 October 2018, but has continued his teaching, clinical and research activities.

Marc Weisskopf

Cecil K. and Philip Drinker Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Physiology Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

Marc G. Weisskopf, Ph.D., Sc.D., is the Cecil K. and Philip Drinker Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Physiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology.

Dr. Weisskopf received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, and his Sc.D. in Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He also spent two years as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention working on environmental health issues in the Wisconsin State Health Department. His neuroscience work focused on molecular and cellular aspects of neural signaling and plasticity. His epidemiological work focuses on the influence of environmental exposures on brain health across the life course. In particular, his research focuses on environmental risk factors for outcomes such as autism spectrum disorders, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cognitive function and dementia, and psychiatric conditions. Dr. Weisskopf also explores the use of physiologically-based methods for assessing toxicant effects on the brain, and epidemiological methods issues to improve causal inference from observational environmental health studies.