DrEmma Lawrance

Emma is the Director of the Climate Cares Centre and Mental Health Lead at the Institute of Global Health Innovation. The Climate Cares Centre works internationally across research, policy, education and intervention design to understand and drive action on the interconnections between the health of the climate and our minds. Emma also leads the Wellcome-funded global initiative Connecting Climate Minds, which has involved around 1200 people across 130 countries to date. She also holds an AXA Climate and Health Fellowship on "Building Youth Resilience by Understanding and Intervening on the Mental Health Impacts of Climate Awareness", working with young people in Australia, Trinidad and the Philippines.

Emma raises awareness of how climate change is a risk multiplier for mental health and how climate action is an opportunity multiplier for mental health through talks to audiences across public health, psychiatry, neuroscience, policy experts, climate scientists, journalists, economists, educators and students. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum "summer Davos" event, COP26, COP27, COP28, COP29, World Congress of Psychiatry, Global Mental Health Action Network and other international events. She has been featured in international tv, radio and print media, including Die Zeit, Al Jazeera, The Times, the Guardian, Forbes, Reuters, Sky News and the BBC. She is an advisor to the OECD Wellbeing and Mental Health Group, the WHO REACH project, and has guest edited special issues for the International Review of Psychiatry and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Emma’s background is in physics and chemistry (BSc (Hons), Flinders University), science communication (Grad Dip, Australian National University) and neuroscience (MSc, University of Oxford). A variety of previous roles include work across science communication and science education. For her DPhil in Clinical Neuroscience she used fMRI and computational modelling to examine how uncertainty is processed in the brain and affects decisions, particularly for those with a tendency to experience anxiety. She also examined the interactions between perceptual uncertainty and strategy uncertainty, and how our brain integrates this information to modulate attentional systems for goal-directed behaviour. Alongside this work she founded the youth mental health charity It Gets Brighter, of which she remains a Trustee.