Professor Ben Wheeler (he/him)

Ben is Professor in Environment, Health and Inequalities at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health (ECEHH). He is a health geographer and environmental epidemiologist with wide ranging research interests in environment-health interconnections. He applies geographical and epidemiological methods to research the beneficial and adverse impacts that the environment can have on human health and health inequalities. 

He works extensively with large, collaborative interdisciplinary research project teams addressing these issues, in projects that have been supported by funders including ESRC, NERC, NIHR, Wellcome Trust and the European Commission. Ben works with a wide range of partners to translate evidence, especially on links between natural environments and health, to inform public health and environmental policy at local, national and international scales. He is co-director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Natural Environments and Health, which is based at ECEHH.

Brief Biography

Ben's PhD was in the Department of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol, on the relationship between socio-economic health and environmental inequalities in the UK. His first post-doctoral research position was at Victoria University of Wellington School of Earth Sciences, in a unit funded by the NZ Ministry of Health to carry out geographical public health research. Subsequent research positions have been at the University of Sheffield Department of Geography, and back at the Department of Social Medicine at Bristol. He has also worked in public health in the National Health Service, and with environmental consultancies. Ben has been at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health since its beginnings in 2010, and was co-director of the Centre from 2022-2024.