About

The Director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health is Philip J. Landrigan, MD, MSc, a pediatrician and epidemiologist. Dr. Landrigan is a graduate of Boston College, class of 1963, Harvard Medical School and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. From 1970-1985, he served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer and medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC). From 1985 to 2018, he was a member of the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, where he served as Chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics, and Dean for Global Health. He is a retired Captain (O-6) in the Medical Corps of the US Naval Reserve and a member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

For 50 years, Dr. Landrigan has studied the connections between toxic chemicals and health with particular emphasis on children’s health. His studies of lead poisoning conducted at CDC in the 1970s demonstrated that lead is toxic to children even at very low levels and contributed to the US government's 1975 decision to remove lead from paint and gasoline, actions that reduced blood lead levels in the USA by 95% and increased the average IQ of all American children born since 1980 by about 5 points. A study he led in the 1990’s at the National Academy of Sciences defined children’s unique susceptibilities to pesticides and catalyzed fundamental revamping of US pesticide policy to better

protect children’s health. From 2015 to 2017, Dr. Landrigan co-chaired the Lancet Commission on Pollution & Health, which reported that pollution causes 9 million deaths annually and is an existential threat to planetary health. In 2022-2023, he led the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health, which analyzed plastics’ negative impacts on human health across the plastic life cycle. He has been a member of the Boston College faculty since 2018.

The Deputy Director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health is Kurt Straif, MD, PhD, an internal medicine physician and epidemiologist, who has devoted his professional life to discovering the environmental causes of cancer and translating these discoveries into cancer prevention programs. For nearly 20 years – from 2001 to 2018 – Dr. Straif served as a medical officer with the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer agency of the World Health Organization. There he directed the Cancer Monographs Programme, a unique global effort that brings together leading scientists from around the world to undertake detailed reviews of chemicals such as benzene, formaldehyde and asbestos, and physical agents such as radiofrequency radiation to determine whether these exposures are carcinogenic to humans. The IARC Monographs Programme is considered the world’s premier arbiter of cancer control policy. Its meticulously curated, evidence-based determinations of the carcinogenicity of environmental exposures shape health policy in more than 150 nations, including the United States.

Dr. Straif has been a member of the Boston College faculty since 2018. In addition to continuing his research on cancer prevention, he teaches an upper-level course in the Epidemiology of Cancer each year. In October 2021, Dr Straif and Prof Andrea Vicini, SJ convened an international conference, The Rising Global Cancer Pandemic: Health, Ethics, and Social Justice that was hosted at Boston College by the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good, the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, and the Theology Department of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences.