Dr Clare Heaviside

I am an Associate Professor in Climate, Cities and Health, at UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering. I was supported by a NERC Independent Research Fellowship (2018-2023), about Human Health in an increasingly urbanised and warming world. I am also PI of a Wellcome Trust funded Health and Climate Change project called HEROIC (Health and Economic Impacts of Reducing Overheating in Cities), which started in 2020.

I'm interested in the impacts of Climate Change, particularly on health and in cities. My research covers temperatures and air pollution effects and urban climate, including the urban heat island effect. I was previously an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham, in the School of Geography Earth and Environmental Science, and an honorary Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, part of the University of London. My background is in meteorology (MSc at Reading University) and ocean and atmospheric physics (PhD at Imperial College).

Prior to UCL, I spent 18 months with my NERC fellowship at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, and before that, I was Head of Climate Change at Public Health England, a government executive Agency, based within the Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards at Harwell in Oxfordshire, UK (currently known as UKHSA). My role at PHE was to coordinate climate change research activities across the agency, lead a team of scientists and PhD students, and to carry out original research on the impacts of climate change on health. I also provided scientific advice to Government and others on the impacts of Climate Change, and contributed to national climate policy through, for example, the national Climate Change Risk Assessment and National Adaptation Programme.

Research interests

My interests broadly cover climate and environmental impacts research, particularly in terms of human health. I am interested in temperature effects, including the impacts of the Urban Heat Island on health, projections of heat and cold related mortality due to climate change, and attribution work to quantify the anthropogenic impact on heat related mortality during heatwaves. I also research and quantify the long-term and short-term health impacts of exposure to air pollutants such as particles, ozone and NO2, as well as volcanic eruptions. I am currently working on mesoscale modelling of the West Midlands Urban Heat Island using WRF (the Weather, Research and Forecasting model). I'm interested in finding out about the spatial extent of the heat island, what the effects of different urban surfaces have on local weather, and advection of warm air downwind of cities. I also have an interest in tropical meteorology and ocean and atmosphere coupling of heat transport.

I was co-editor and contributing author on a comprehensive Department of Health funded report The Health Effects of Climate Change in the UK 2012 which assesses and quantifies further risks to health from Climate Change in the UK and contributed to reports such as the IPCC reports and the National Climate Change Risk Assessment. I have supervised PhD students in the Universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham and London. See my UCL page here.

Brief CV

2023 - Associate Professor in Climate, Cities and Health, UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, London

2020 - 2023 NERC Independent Research Fellow (continued), UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, London

2018 - 2020 NERC Independent Research Fellow, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford

2017 - 2018 Head of Climate Change, Public Health England, Harwell, UK

2014 - 2020 Honorary Senior Lecturer, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London

2010 - 2020 Honorary Research Fellow, Birmingham University

2013 - 2017 Principal Climate Change Scientist, Public Health England, Harwell, UK

2009 - 2013 Climate Change Scientist, Health Protection Agency, Oxfordshire

2005 - 2009 PhD in Oceanic and Atmospheric coupling, Dept of Physics, Imperial College, London supervisor: Arnaud Czaja

2004 - 2005 MSc in Applied Meteorology, University of Reading

2002 - 2004 Senior Analyst, Thomson Scientific, London

2000 - 2002 Systems Integration Engineer, Motorola, Basingstoke

1997 - 2000 BEng (Hons) Electronic Engineering (Communications), University of Sheffield

Contact details

Dr Clare Heaviside

email: c.heaviside [at] ucl.ac.uk

twitter: @climateclare1

Publications

Google Sites

Report abuse