Rachel Lowe is an ICREA Research Professor and Global Health Resilience Group Leader. She also holds a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Rachel’s research focuses on co-developing policy-relevant methodological solutions, to enhance surveillance, preparedness and response to climate-sensitive disease outbreaks and emergence. 

Rachel obtained a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Exeter in 2010. Her thesis focused on spatiotemporal modelling of dengue epidemics in Brazil. She held postdoctoral positions at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy and the Catalan Institute for Climate Sciences, working at the interface of climate prediction science and public health decision-making. She joined the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 2017, serving on the management committee for the Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health and co-leading the vector-borne disease theme in the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases. 

She has published high impact research on integrating seasonal climate forecasts in early warning systems for infectious diseases in Latin America, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. In 2018, she won the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases Water Award for Research, in recognition of the quality of her research on the linkages between hydrometeorological extremes and dengue outbreaks and the multi-sectoral relevance for policy and practice. Rachel has served as a consultant and advisor for impact-based forecasting projects for the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières. She was a member of the World Meteorological Organization COVID-19 research task team and was a contributing author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (WGII) chapter on risks across sectors and regions.

Rachel coordinates two Wellcome Trust digital technology, climate, and health projects, HARMONIZE and IDExtremes, which aim to provide robust data and modelling tools to build local resilience against emerging infectious disease threats in climate change hotspots. She is the co-coordinator of the Horizon Europe project IDAlert, which aims to tackle the emergence and transmission of zoonotic pathogens by developing novel indicators and innovative early warning systems to strengthen Europe’s resilience to emerging health threats. Between 2021-2024, Rachel served as Director the Lancet Countdown in Europe, a transdisciplinary collaboration tracking progress on health and climate change.