Climate + health researcher

UNSW Sydney

I completed a PhD with UNSW, focusing on how to identify dangerously hot days and how they might change in the future.

I did an honours year, followed by a PhD, with the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW on the health impacts of climate change.

My PhD specifically looked at how we define dangerously hot days in Australian cities (is humid heat more dangerous? Are hot days more dangerous at the end of a heatwave?), how those days are changing with the climate, and what that means for our hospitals in the future.

Find my thesis at unsw.edu.au

(As a thesis, it’s a bit long! If you’re looking for a more general publication record, that’s on Google Scholar.)

When I originally returned to do an honours degree, I actually didn’t intend to do a PhD (please don’t tell my supervisor). After years of teaching myself animation, I wanted to make videos about climate science, but I didn’t feel I had the understanding or authority (and I wasn’t aware of the growing courses in science communication).

When I reached out to the CCRC, they had an honours project around health, statistics and climate. I loved all of those ideas (and understood one of them 😅), so I gratefully accepted, intending to move on a year later. Turns out it didn’t work out that way at all!

Many of the early projects on this site were experiments or side-projects developed during my PhD.