DrRachel Murray-Watson

I am an Imperial College Research Fellow working at the interface of climate and health. I am particularly focussed on how weather shocks are experienced within healthcare systems. This covers a wide remit - healthcare seeking behaviour, demand for services, and the system’s ability to provide care will have very different responses. To date, most of my work has primarily been centred on lower- and middle-income countries, but there is general applicability to other health systems. Alongside my interest in health systems, I am also interested in climate-sensitive diseases (such as cholera, vector-borne diseases, and heat-related diseases), attribution science, and loss and damage mechanisms.

Previously, I worked on the Thanzi La Onse model (www.tlo.org), an all-disease, individual-based model of Malawi's healthcare system. My particular focus is the projected impact of climate change. Before this, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale's School of Public Health (2023-2024), working on a range of machine-learning based decision support tools for infectious disease management.

I completed my PhD in Theoretical and Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge's Department of Plant Sciences (2018-2022). My work focussed on developing coupled game-theoretic and mathematical models of growers' behaviors and its impact on the success (or otherwise) of the control of plant diseases. Knowing that I may want to transition to human health, I completed a MSc in Demography and Health at LSHTM alongside my PhD.

I hold a BSc in Biological Sciences from Imperial College London (2018).