Dr Elisa Puzzolo MSc(hons), MPH, PhD

Personal Statement

Elisa is a Senior Research Fellow in Global Public Health within the Department of Public Health, Policy and Systems. She is the Co-Director of the CLEAN-Air(Africa) Global Health Research Unit (£7 million) funded by the UK NIHR and jointly leads the Energy, Air Pollution and Health Research Group with Prof. Daniel Pope.

Her primary research focus is the health effects and adoption of household cooking interventions to reduce exposure to household air pollution (HAP) from polluting fuel use in Low and Middle-income countries (LMICs). Much of her research relates to the evaluation of interventions, including the assessment of clean cooking fuels and technologies and their impacts on health and society through mixed-method research.
She is a member of the US National Institute of Health (NIH) Implementation Science Network for Clean Cooking and has been a co-investigator and policy communication advisor to the Household Air Pollution Investigation Network (HAPIN) trial (2017-2022). She is also the Senior Scientific Advisor to the Global LPG Partnership (GLPGP), a UN-backed NGO specialised in working with LMIC governments to create national plans for rapid and sustainable scale-up of LPG for clean cooking, including from renewable sources (bio-LPG).

In her former roles, Elisa worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva (2013-2014), contributing to the coordination programme on household energy, air pollution, health, and climate change, and was the GLPGP Director for Research Monitoring and Evaluation (2014-2022).