Join us for Professor Benjamin Barratt’s Imperial Inaugural online or in person.
There is no need to register to attend so please be sure to use the add to calendar button.
We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday 9 October!
Summary
Over the past two decades, awareness of air pollution and its health impacts have changed dramatically. What was once a specialist topic of little interest to the public, is now a hot topic that can make or break political campaigns. Driving this transformation is more robust evidence of how breathing polluted air affects our health, coupled with more accessible methods to inform populations and policy makers of these risks. New technology, datasets and models can uncover increasingly precise patterns and associations between our health and the environment. However, in this age of ‘big data’, it is easy to forget that behind every statistic is a person.
Ben Barratt is a Professor of Environmental Exposures and Public Health at Imperial College London. For the past 25 years he has worked to improve the health of populations through better air quality. His team have been instrumental in advancing the field of air pollution exposure science in clinical, epidemiological and behavioural studies. In his inaugural lecture he will explore how we can improve public health by empowering the most vulnerable in society, from miniaturised technology through to knitting. He will tell the story of individuals, who, without the use of AI or machine learning, have driven change by helping to make the invisible visible, the irrelevant relevant and the distant local.
Biography
Ben Barratt is a Professor in Environmental Exposures and Public Health and Deputy Director of the Environmental Research Group. The early part of his career utilised a foundation in measurement techniques and data handling to develop analysis methods to characterise sources, trends and behaviour in urban air pollution. He helped to establish the London Air Quality Network and created the Breathe London initiative. The aim of more recent research is to improve the resolution of environmental exposure assessments for panel, cohort and large-scale population studies. This is linked to the development of tools to allow the public to make informed choices to reduce their own exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution. His research is often in collaboration with international multidisciplinary teams ranging from toxicology and population health through to behavioural science and policy development. Much of the focus of his work is on global air quality, primarily in China and Sub-Saharan Africa.