Matilda Van Den Bosch

Matilda is a doctor in medicine as well as in landscape planning and public health.
She holds a shared affiliation between the School of Population and Public Health and the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences.

She investigates how environmental exposures, for example urban green and blue spaces, can influence human health with a recent focus on childhood health and development. The policy goal is to contribute to evidence-based development of healthier cities in a changing climate, with sustainable solutions for the health of humans and natural environments.

Her interests include regulating urban ecosystem services, such as heat reduction and consequential reduction in heat related morbidity and mortality, as well as cultural services from urban nature, involving for example increased physical activity and stress recovery in relation to preventing several non-communicable diseases. Previous studies have included experimental research in virtual reality laboratories, analyzing psychophysiological responses to different standardized environments with biomarkers. Various methods are used for analysing impact of exposures, such as epidemiology, GIS-analyses, randomised trials, and systematic reviews. She has also developed theories on how external and internal stimuli affect our automatic brain systems, based on neurological fundaments regarding altruism, pro-social and pro-environmental behaviour.

Matilda works for numerous health and environment related international organizations, for example the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Health Canada. Apart from pan-Canadian collaborations, she has a broad, international network, across health and environmental disciplines, in for example Germany, Sweden, UK, Iran, US, Italy, and Spain. She is Associate Editor of Urban Forestry & Urban Greening and primary editor of the Oxford University Press Textbook on Nature and Public Health (2018).