Mirko Winkler, Associate Professor, PhD, DTM&H, MSc

Mirko Winkler is Professor in Urban Public Health at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Basel. The professorship is hosted at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) and has a focus on the promotion of sustainable urban communities and their health benefits.

Trained in Environmental Sciences (MSc ETH), Epidemiology (PhD) and Clinical Tropical Medicine (DTM&H), Prof. Dr. Mirko Winkler leads the Urban Public Health Unit at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. His research and teaching activities focus on the interactions between environmental change, social change, sustainable development and public health. He has conducted research in Africa and South America on how the development of large infrastructure projects, such as mining and renewable energy, affects the health of the communities in which they take place (e.g. https://hia4sd.net). In the Middle East, he applied the health impact assessment (HIA) approach in contexts of protracted conflict to advise humanitarian actors. Mirko Winkler investigated the health risks and opportunities of wastewater reuse in urban agriculture in four large cities in the global south. The study of health effects associated with pesticide use in small-holder farmers in tropical settings is another stream of research he has been pursuing. Overall, Mirko Winkler’s approaches are part of the growing field of sustainability science, which seeks to provide data and evidence-based support for projects, programmes and policies, and thus contribute to positive social transformations.

Mirko Winkler is a lecturer at Swiss TPH and at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Basel. Moreover, he leads a lecture series on HIA at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and is a guest lecturer at different universities in Switzerland. At the international level, Mirko Winkler and a network of collaborators offer various HIA teaching and training courses in different formats, targeting practitioners, decision-makers and academics.