EGA IfWH Edward Holme Public Lecture 2025

EGA Institute for Women's Health, University College London Edward Holme Public Lecture, 2025

Protecting pregnant women and babies from extreme heat in a warming planet

Professor Jane Hirst, Chair of Global Women’s Health, Imperial College LondonDirector of Women’s Health, The George Institute for Global HealthConsultant Obstetrician

Professor Hirst completed her medical degree and specialist training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Australia in 2008. Her academic excellence has been recognised with several prestigious awards, including the Christopher Kohlenberg Medal, the Shan S. Ratnam Young Gynaecologists Award, and the Prime Minister’s Asia-Australia Endeavour Award. She earned her PhD through pioneering research on gestational diabetes in Vietnam, revealing a high prevalence of the condition and highlighting systemic barriers to care in low-resource settings. In 2024, she was profiled in The Lancet as a champion of Global Women’s Health (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01132-2/abstract).

In 2013, she was awarded a Nuffield Medical Fellowship to join the University of Oxford, where she became part of the INTERGROWTH-21st Project—developing the first international fetal and newborn growth standards. During this time, she co-developed GDmHealth, a mobile-based remote glucose monitoring system for women with gestational diabetes. In 2021, she was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to develop scalable, technology-enabled interventions that use pregnancy as a pivotal point to enhance women's lifelong health. She leads the SMARThealth Pregnancy program in rural India, a community co-developed initiative designed to improve detection, referral, and postnatal follow-up for high-risk pregnancies. Evaluated in a cluster randomised trial across 60 villages and 3,450 women, this work has informed the development of several new initiatives, including PRAMH (a perinatal mental health intervention) and SMARThealth GPT, a large language model chatbot supporting frontline health workers.

Professor Hirst contributes to global policy as a member of the FIGO Pregnancy Passport working group and the Asian Development Bank Climate and Health Initiative. She is the UK co-lead of the NIHR RIGHT 7 SMARThealth Caribbean program, adapting her work to reduce postpartum cardiometabolic risk across four Caribbean nations.

In response to the growing threat of climate change, she co-leads the Wellcome-funded Heat in Pregnancy–India program, which investigates extreme heat's biological, physiological, and social effects on pregnant women. Professor Hirst has supervised and mentored junior doctors and women’s health researchers globally.