Distinguished Professor
Lidia Morawska

Biography

Lidia Morawska is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia; the Director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH) at QUT, a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Air Quality and Health; a Co-Director in Australia for the Australia – China Centre for Air Quality Science and Management (ACC-AQSM); an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Environmental and Climate Research (ECI), at the Jinan University, Guangzhou, China; and a Vice-Chancellor Fellow, Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), University of Surrey, United Kingdom. She conducts fundamental and applied research in the interdisciplinary field of air quality and its impact on human health and the environment, with a specific focus on science of airborne particulate matter. She is an author of over 950 journal papers, book chapters and conference papers. She has also been involved at the executive level with a number of relevant national and international professional bodies and has been acting as an advisor to the WHO.

Lidia Morawska grew up in a city in the south-eastern part of Poland – Przemyśl. This is where she completed her primary and secondary education during her university years. She is a physicist and received her doctorate in 1982 at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland for research on radon and its progeny. From 1982 to 1987, she was a research fellow at the Institute of Physics and Nuclear Techniques, Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, Cracow, Poland. She spent from 1987 to 1991 in Canada, conducting research first at McMaster University in Hamilton, as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and later at the University of Toronto. In 1991, she was appointed Senior Lecturer at QUT, as well as promoted to Professor in 2003. In 1992, she established the Environmental Aerosol Laboratory at QUT, renamed the ILAQH in 2002, when it became a WHO Collaborating Centre for Air Quality and Health. She is a long-standing collaborator and advisor to the WHO and has contributed to all WHO air quality-related guidelines since 1990, including co-chairing the Guideline Development Group (2006 to 2021), responsible for numerous standards. She is Associate Editor of Science of the Total Environment journal since 2010.

In recognition of her contributions to the field, she received the 2021 ISIAQ Special 2020 Award for an Extraordinary Academic Leadership. In September 2021, was named in the 2021 TIME100 annual list of the hundred most influential people in the world. In 2020, was elected in a Fellow to the Australian Academy of Science, named one of Australia’s top 40 researchers in The Australian Research Magazine (2020), ranked in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend’s 40 Australians Who Mattered: Health and Science, and ranked 16,428 in the Stanford University ranking of 100,000 Top Scientists. She was also the recipient of the 2020 QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Leadership Excellence, the 2018 Eureka Prize for Infectious Diseases Research (Australian Museum of Eureka Prizes), as well as theAmerican Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR) 2017 David Sinclair Award, where in his nomination of her for this award, Professor Tunga Salthammer of the Fraunhofer WKI (Germany) stated that she “…has long been considered as one of the top researchers in the field of aerosol science, covering a broad scientific spectrum including, radon, traffic exhaust, indoor related particle emissions, modeling and occupational exposure. For more than 30 years, she has worked in challenging and important areas of aerosol research, with her outstanding results of substantial value for other researchers”.  Prior to this, she was also the recipient of a ‘QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Performance Award 2017’ “in recognition of a significant and superior contribution to the work of the university”, and in 2011,the ‘Clean Air Medal, Clean Air Society of Australia and New Zealand (CASANZ) ‘for “…sustained and dedicated contribution to the understanding of fine particles in the air”. She is also past President of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate.