Urban design, transport, and health

Zoë is an Ex-Officio Board Member of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health and an International Advisory Board member of Sun-Yat Sen Global Health Institute, Guangzhou, China. Between 2013 and 2017 she was a Council Member and Trustee of the Committee on Publication Ethics. She trained in Biochemistry at the University of Bath, UK, before joining the publishing industry in 1997 as a Scientific Information Officer with CABI. She moved to The Lancet in 1999, where she has worked since, variously as a technical editor, section editor, editorial lead for several global health Series and Special Issues, and founding editor of The Lancet Global Health.

Billie Giles-Corti is a Distinguished Professor and an Inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Fellow at RMIT University.  For over two decades, she and a multi-disciplinary research team have been studying the impact of the built environment on health and wellbeing. She currently leads the Healthy Liveable Cities Lab in RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research. Between 2017-2020 she was RMIT’s Urban Futures Enabling Capability Development Platform Inaugural Director. Between 2014 and 2020 she led an NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Liveable Communities; and between 2007-2011 she was Foundation Director of UWA’s Centre for the Built Environment. She is a Technical Advisor of the Victorian Office of the Government Architect’s Design Review Panel, a member of the Victorian Planning Authority’s Precinct Structure Plan Review Committee, a member of Melbourne Water’s Liveability Panel and an Honorary Fellow of both the Planning Institute of Australia and the Public Health Association.  She has published over 400 articles, book chapters and reports, and by citations, has been ranked in the top 1% of researchers in her field globally.  She is Fulbright Scholar and in 2016, was an NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Senior Principal Research Fellow as the top ranked female NHMRC public health fellow.

Dr Melanie Lowe is Research Fellow in Urban Resilience and Innovation in the Melbourne Centre for Cities at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Melanie’s research investigates how to plan healthy cities, and the use of indicators to monitor and inform policy. She works at the interface of the public health and urban planning fields, highlighting the co-benefits that can be achieved for human health, sustainable development, liveability and urban resilience. She has published in highly ranked academic journals, including The Lancet, Social Science and Medicine and Planning Theory and Practice. Melanie works collaboratively with researchers and policymakers across a range of disciplines to strengthen consideration of health in city planning. Her research has been included in local, state and federal planning and public health policy documents in Australia. 

Professor Ester Cerin is a psychologist, epidemiologist and statistician. She leads the Behaviour, Environment and Cognition Research Program within the Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research of the Australian Catholic University. Her research program focuses on the effects of the neighbourhood environment and lifestyle behaviours on cardiovascular, cognitive and mental health across the lifespan. She has held substantive academic positions in Australia, USA and Hong Kong. She is President Elect of the International Society of Behavioral Nutrition of Physical Activity and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s journal. She is the founder of the International Cognitive Health and the Environment Network (ICHEN) and chair of the Council for the Environment and Physical Activity – Older Adult section.  Professor Cerin has authored over 280 scientific articles in high-impact international peer-reviewed journals. Her work has informed the World Health Organisation’s Global Action Plan in Physical Activity and urban planning policy in Hong Kong.

Geoff Boeing is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Director of USC’s Urban Data Lab. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Urban Informatics and Planning at Northeastern University. He received his PhD. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley and completed a postdoc in Berkeley’s Urban Analytics Lab. Professor Boeing’s scholarship intersects city planning, urban form, and data science. His recent research has been published in journals across scientific and policy disciplines, including the Journal of the American Planning Association, Environment and Planning A, Applied Network Science, Geographical Analysis, Frontiers in Neurology, and Urban Design International. He has additionally served as a consultant for several planning, policymaking, and public health organizations.

Deborah Salvo, PhD, is an assistant professor of public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, where she co-directs the People, Health and Place Unit. Before this appointment, she held positions at the University of Texas School Health Science Center in Austin, Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center, and the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico. Dr Salvo is involved in several international leadership initiatives for physical activity, built environment and public health research and advocacy, including chairing the Council on Environment and Physical Activity within the International Society for Physical Activity and Health (ISPAH), being a member of steering committee of the Global Observatory for Physical Activity, and being an active member of the Our Voice Global Network. Throughout her career, she has served as technical advisor on physical activity and the built environment for multiple agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Fogarty International Center within the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico, the Pan American Health Organization, and the World Health Organization. Dr Salvo was a contributing author to the second and third series on physical activity published by The Lancet in 2016 and 2021, respectively, which convened global experts to present the latest evidence of the important role of physical activity for public health.

Carl Higgs is a research data scientist and PhD student in the Healthy Liveable Cities Lab of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University.  With a background in spatial epidemiology and computational statistics, through his PhD he is developing methods to support calculation and dissemination of spatial indicators of urban liveability using open data and an open science ethos, to support planners, policy makers and researchers to better understand, monitor and shape the impacts of the built environment on health and wellbeing. 

Felix John is the Bicycle Mayor of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.  He was appointed as part of a global network of Bicycle Mayors, by the Amsterdam-based global NGO BYCS.  BYCS believes that bicycles transform cities and cities transform the world.  He is a resident of Chennai and strongly advocates and promotes non-motorized transport for commuting and healthy lifestyle.  He also enjoys the pleasure of long distance and endurance cycling. As a Bicycle Mayor his mission is to promote and help the city adopt active mobility more specifically the bicycle. The Bicycle Mayor Network has the objective of 50x30—50% of city trips by bicycle before 2030. Felix is an entrepreneur by profession, cyclist by passion and an artist in his own time. He works on projects to enhance the experience of the city on a bicycle with the city’s stakeholders and engage the community for more adoption.

Dr Rachel Huxley is Director of Knowledge and Learning, responsible for C40’s knowledge management strategy and research programme. Rachel has been with C40 for over 5 years during which time she has developed and led a priority programme of research on the multiple benefits of urban climate action and overseen the launch of C40’s flagship Knowledge Hub. Prior to this Rachel was Chief Executive of Peterborough Environment City Trust, leading the Trust’s work on sustainable behaviour change and engagement project delivery, as well as, working strategically with city partners to develop a sustainable city plan. As part of her work on sustainable cities Rachel established and led the Sustainable Cities Network, an informal network of leading UK cities to enable sharing of best practice and challenges. Rachel has a PhD from the University of Leeds on the processes and practices of sustainable transition and decision making in cities.

Thiago Hérick de Sá holds a degree in Sports Science, and master’s and PhD degree in Public Health. He started his career as a physical educator, working with older people at hospitals, primary care settings and households in Brazil. From 2010, Thiago worked as a researcher in Brazil and in the UK, with a track record of scientific publications in high-impact journals. Thiago joined WHO in 2017 to support the work around urban, transport and health, including the development of WHO’s Urban Health Initiative (ongoing) and WHO’s Urban Health Research Agenda (2022). He also led the development of several technical resources such as the Sourcebook on Integrating Health in Urban and Territorial Planning (2020) and the adaptation for global use of the HEAT tool (2021). In 2022, Thiago joined the Department of Social Determinants of Health to lead the work on Age-friendly environments, including the Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities.