Protecting pregnant women and babies from extreme heat in a warming planet
Join Professor Jane Hirst for a lecture addressing the growing threat of extreme heat to pregnant women and newborns, which is part of the Edward Holme Public Lecture Series 2025.

About the Speaker
Professor Jane Hirst
Chair of Global Women’s Health, Imperial College London
Director of Women’s Health, The George Institute for Global Health
Consultant 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.
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.
About the Edward Holme Public Lecture series
Dr Edward Holme, who died in 1847 bequeathed the residue of his estate to be left to UCL and to be used towards a Lecture series which may deal with any branch of Medicine, Surgery or Pathology and to be awarded to Lecturers selected either from amongst UCL staff or externally. Edward Holme (1170-1847) was an English physician and supporter of learned societies.
Further information
Ticketing
Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes