Maria Nilsson

I am Associate Professor with research about climate change and health. My main interest is climate adaptation, climate communication and policy development. Another research area is tobacco prevention, with a focus on evaluation of preventive programs.

I have leadership roles in several externally funded projects, for ex: "Household Preferences on Lifestyles Transformation for Emission Reduction in Low Carbon Societies" (WP-leader) with partners in Germany, France and Norway. In another project I lead "Dengue risk communication in a local Indonesian community – understanding knowledge, attitudes and practice to improve action" we study how an Early Warning System for Dengue fever can be developed in close cooperation with the local community (PI). I was integrating editor for health in the Lancet Commission "Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health" published in 2015. I co-lead the working group on adaptation planning and resilience in "The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change". It is an international, multi-disciplinary research collaboration running until 2030 following on from the 2015 Lancet Commission (lancetcountdown.org) aiming at tracking health impacts and the world's response to climate change.

My other research interest is tobacco control and prevention targeting young people, with more than 20 years of experience. In my PhD-thesis in Epidemiology and Public Health Sciences I studied how tobacco use can be prevented amongst young people. I was a member of an advisory board for the Swedish Government for drug and tobacco policy in 2008 - 2017. Together with researchers from Uppsala/Wayne State University I studied waterpipe use in young people "An evidence-based intervention study to prevent water pipe use in school going adolescents". Currently I lead a research project collaborating with researchers at our unit and at KI evaluating a method to prevent youth smoking funded by the Swedish Public Health Agency, with an RCT combined with an observation study and a health economic evaluation.

I am a SIGHT fellow, awarded a fellowship with an individual leadership program in Global health. SIGHT (Swedish Institute for Global Health Transformation) is part of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (sight.nu). Since 2014 I am one of the editors of the open access journal Global Health Action (tandfonline.com/toc/zgha20/current).

Read more about my research in the article "Rising temperatures heighten ill-health" (from the magazine Think, no. 1, 2019)