Prof Lea Berrang Ford

Professor Lea Berrang Ford is Head of the UKHSA Centre for Climate and Health Security and former Priestley Chair in Climate and Health at the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds. She oversees strategic national coordination of preparedness for the public health impacts of climate change, including national vectorborne disease surveillance and England’s Heat-Health Alerting System. She co-edited UKHSA’s 2023 assessment report Health Effects of Climate Change in the UK: State of Evidence, was a Lead Author on the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment Report, is a co-author on the 2022 and 2023 reports of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change, and led the Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative, an international collaboration of >125 scientists to assess evidence on progress on global adaptation to climate change. Berrang Ford is a former Research Chair in Climate and Health with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and former a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow. She has a PhD in infectious disease epidemiology, and is an expert in climate change impacts on health, adaptation to the health effects of climate change, and the health implications of decarbonisation. She was on the ‘Hot List of Top Climate Scientists’ (Reuters 2020, 17th among women).