DrKristine Belesova

Kristine is an Associate Professor in Global Population Health and Sustainability at Imperial College London. She was trained as an environmental epidemiologist embracing the planetary health approach. Kristine’s interests include impacts of global environmental change, particularly climate change, land system change, and biodiversity loss, on human health and nutrition. Increasingly, Kristine’s research is focussed on developing and evaluating win-win solutions for the health of people and planet. She focuses on maximising cost-effective synergies across social, economic, and environmental goals and averting negative unintended consequences. She is particularly interested in nature-based solutions for agro-ecosystem restoration and in public food procurement system transformation as a vehicle for improving global health and sustainability.

At the School of Public Health, Kristine is part of the senior leadership team of the NIHR Global Health Research Centre on Non-Communicable Diseases and Environment Change with India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia as focus countries.

Prior to her appointment at Imperial College London, Kristine co-founded and served as a co-director of the Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She also held appointments at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto in Canada, and United Nations University in Germany, and at Latvian Environmental Investment Fund.

Kristine holds a PhD in Environmental Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, and the 1st Class BSc(Hons) in Sustainable Development from the University of St Andrews.