Take a deep breath?

Join Imperial College London’s School of Public Health – based in White City Innovation District – for Professor Benjamin Barratt’s Imperial Inaugural – online or in person.

Join the lecture live on the Imperial YouTube channel.

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.