Summary
Dr Ben Barratt is a Reader in Environmental Exposures & Public Health and Deputy Director of the Environmental Research Group.
The early part of his career focused on the establishment of co-ordinated air quality monitoring networks, including the London Air Quality Network, which became the largest urban network in Europe. He has since utilised this foundation in measurement techniques and data handling to develop analysis methods to characterise sources, trends and behaviour in urban air pollution. He specialised in the evaluation of technological or policy driven initiatives to improve air quality, including the London Congestion Charging Scheme and Low Emission Zone, the outputs of which have been used as evidence for future national and international schemes.
The aim of more recent research is to improve the resolution of environmental exposure assessments for panel, cohort and large-scale population studies. This is linked to the development of tools to allow the public to make informed choices to reduce their own exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution. His research is often in collaboration with international multidisciplinary teams ranging from toxicology and population health through to behavioural science and policy development.
He is head of the Exposure Science Team, currently comprising five research associates, two research assistants and up to six PhD students. The overarching aim of his team’s work is to better characterise individual and population-level exposure to environmental stress, how this relates to the health of susceptible population subgroups, and methods of public health improvement. Much of the focus of the teams work is on global air quality, primarily in China and Sub-Saharan Africa.
EA Contact: l.ruane@imperial.ac.uk
Publications
Journals
Chatzidiakou L, Krause A, Kellaway M, et al., 2022, Automated classification of time-activity-location patterns for improved estimation of personal exposure to air pollution, Environmental Health, Vol:21
Delgado-Saborit JM, Lim S, Hickman A, et al., 2022, Factors affecting occupational black carbon exposure in enclosed railway stations, Atmospheric Environment, Vol:289, ISSN:1352-2310, Pages:1-14
Vu TV, Stewart GB, Kitwiroon N, et al., 2022, Assessing the contributions of outdoor and indoor sources to air quality in London homes of the SCAMP cohort, Building and Environment, Vol:222, ISSN:0360-1323, Pages:1-8
Zhang H, Fan Y, Han Y, et al., 2022, Partitioning indoor-generated and outdoor-generated PM2.5 from real-time residential measurements in urban and peri-urban Beijing, Science of the Total Environment, Vol:845, ISSN:0048-9697
Suel E, Sorek-Hamer M, Moise I, et al., 2022, What you see is what you breathe? Estimating air pollution spatial variation using street level imagery, Remote Sensing, Vol:14, ISSN:2072-4292