WEHI Director’s Seminar hosted by Professors Ken Smith
 

Professor Ollie Jay

The University of Sydney

Professor of Heat and Health


Academic Director: Heat and Health Research Centre


Director: Thermal Ergonomics Laboratory

Building resilience to a warming planet across the human lifespan

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday

Including Q&A session

Our planet is heating up. Nine of the 10 hottest years ever recorded in Australia have occurred since 2005, the risk of extreme summer heatwaves has doubled globally since 1990, and summer conditions traditionally classified as “extreme” are set to be the new “normal” by the next decade. Mitigating the health effects of extreme heat and humidity has now been declared “The public health challenge for the 21st century” leading to the Australian Medical Association to formally recognise heat as a leading component of the health emergency that climate change poses to humans.  

At the University of Sydney, the Heat and Health Research Centre (HHRC) seeks to understand the various contributory pathways to heat vulnerability and harness this information to develop sustainable evidence-based solutions that increase heat resilience across the human lifespan (pregnancy to elderly). In this presentation, HHRC Director, Professor Ollie Jay will describe the work currently being undertaken by multi-disciplinary teams of researchers within the Centre’s five priority research areas: Maternal and Child Health; Physical Activity, Sport and Occupational Health; Ageing and Chronic Diseases; Landscapes and the Built Environment; and Humanitarian Settings.

Recent examples of high-impact projects will be discussed including the development of a tool (HeatWatch) providing personalised heat-health risk alerts with accompanying evidence-based cooling and hydration advice; a collaboration with Google to deliver University of Sydney research evidence directly to people in over 200 countries through alert notifications; the “fan-first” cooling strategy that has the potential to reduce electricity consumption from air-conditioning by ~70%; and new work that is helping define the real limits of human survival with extreme heat and humidity. 

Ollie Jay is Professor of Heat and Health and Director of the Heat and Health Research Centre in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at The University of Sydney. 

Ollie is a NHMRC Investigator Fellow and has led several large-scale projects that have directly influenced international public health heatwave policies in the United States, Europe, and Australia. He recently partnered with Google to deliver his team’s research on evidence-based personal cooling strategies through automated heat warning alerts in Google Maps/Chrome worldwide.  He has also led extreme heat policy development for Sports Medicine Australia, Tennis Australia (Australian Open), and Cricket Australia, and was the Lead Heat Consultant for the Australian Olympic Team in the Paris 2024 games. Ollie was recently profiled by The Lancet in their 2021 Heat & Health Series, and his research program has been featured in Science and Nature highlighting its lead global contribution to protecting society’s most vulnerable to the heat. Since 2024, Ollie has served as Chair of the “Hazards and Impacts” Working Group for the Global Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change team. 

All welcome!