Susan Prescott is a Professor of Planetary Health in the School of Medicine at the University of Western Australia. She is a pediatrician, immunologist, artist, and award-winning author, internationally recognized for her cutting-edge research into the early environmental determinants of health and disease. Her work promotes awareness of the interconnections between personal and planetary health in ways that inspire creative, integrated, and wise approaches, grounded in reciprocity, for social and ecological justice and flourishing futures.

She worked as a practicing physician at the Perth Children’s Hospital for over 30 years and is a Founding Director of the ORIGINS Project at the KIDS Research Institute, Australia. This $30 million legacy project, based at Joondalup Health Campus, examines how the environment influences health throughout life and how we can improve this.

Susan is Editor-in-Chief of Challenges journal, which promotes interdisciplinary discourse in planetary health, and founding Director of the Nova Network (formerly inVIVO Planetary Health), a global transdisciplinary network focused on transforming the health of people, places, and the planet (since 2012), now based at the Nova Institute for Health in Baltimore. She is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.

Her interests and expertise are focused on early life risk factors for inflammation as an antecedent (and preventive target) for a broad range of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), with a particular interest in early onset NCDs such as allergy, obesity, and mental health. She is the Founding President of the multidisciplinary ‘DOHaD’ Society in Australia and New Zealand (Developmental Origins of Health and Disease).

She has been awarded more than $52 million in research grants as chief investigator and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Winston Churchill Fellowship. In 2009, she was awarded a prestigious Practitioner Fellowship (2009-2018) by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and in 2010 her work was recognized in the “10 of the Best” in Australia.

In addition to over 350 scientific publications, she is also the author of several books for an international public audience: The Allergy Epidemic – A Mystery of Modern Life, The Calling, and Origins - Early Life Solutions to the Modern Health Crisis. Most recently, she authored The Secret Life of Your Microbiome: Why Nature and Biodiversity Are Essential to Health and Happiness – winner of the 2018 Gold Medal at the Independent Publishers Book Awards (health), and a 2017 Finalist in the Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards. 

Susan cares deeply about the social determinants of health and takes a holistic approach to life. She is involved in a wide variety of activities promoting a vision of holism, in which inclusion is upheld, diversity is celebrated, and the notion of all working together to solve our shared global challenges is encouraged.

Her inspiration to study medicine came from her grandmother, one of the few women to study medicine in the 1930s, and her love of research and academia was inspired by her grandfather, Sir Stanley Prescott, former Vice-Chancellor of The University of Western Australia.