Jennie is a Medical Research Council Fellow at LSTM. She is an ecologist by training, spending four years as an ecological consultant before starting her postdoctoral research career. As an ecological consultant, Jennie contributed to environmental and ecological impact assessments for large developments in the UK. This experience gave her insights into how the natural environment and human health are often dealt with separately, nature is exploited in our current economic system and the shortcomings of policy with respect to the natural environment, despite healthy ecosystems underpinning what we need to live healthy lives.

Jennie’s postdoctoral research at the University of Florida and LSTM focussed on ecological and environmental drivers of vector-borne disease transmission. She secured a fellowship at LSTM in 2020 which has enabled her to start to broaden her research interests. She is a member of the Climate, Environment and Health Working Group and the Institute for Resilient Health Systems. She also contributes to the Sustainability Committee, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee and is part of the Race Equality Charter Self-Assessment Team. Jennie sometimes has a go at writing poetry and very occasionally flash fiction.

Jennie is currently involved in two projects concerning the transmission and control of zoonotic mosquito-borne pathogens. The first is looking at Japanese encephalitis virus in Bangladesh in collaboration with Dr. Shafiul Alam and team at icddr,b. The second is a project on the transmission of Rift Valley fever virus in Tanzania in between national epidemics, in collaboration with Dr. Oliva Kijanga and Dr. Furaha Mramba and team at the Vector and Vector-borne Diseases Research Institute, Tanzania and Dr. Sarah Cleaveland and Dr. Paul Johnson at the University of Glasgow.

 

While the research Jennie is currently involved in is a continuation of her postdoctoral experience, since securing research independence, key scholarly work, including Dr J. Breilh - Critical Epidemiology and the People’s Health and Dr. S. Abimbola - The Foreign Gaze: Essays on Global Health has been published. Jennifer is working with others, albeit slowly, to take a more critical and reflective approach to ecology in a global health context and to apply political ecology in health-related research. This includes re-thinking how research is done, for example eliminating air travel and communicating that behavioural change to others, and shifting organising frames to also capture structural causes of disease outbreaks that are entangled in the current exploitation – often by a wealthy minority – of people, other species, and our natural environment. She tried to summarise this in a recent talk at LSTM's 125th Anniversary Symposium: The Impacts of Climate and Ecological Breakdown: How Should We Respond?