Gregory Wellenius has been named the Beverly A. Brown Professor for the Improvement of Urban Health.

Endowed in 2012 through a $4 million donation from Boston University trustee emeritus Richard Shipley (SMG’68, GSM’72), the professorship honors and supports the work of a highly distinguished professor whose research, teaching, and service advance the condition of the more than half the world’s population who live in urban areas. The professorship is named for Beverly A. Brown, the long-time development director of the former Center for Global Health and Development and the wife of BU president emeritus Robert A. Brown.

At the time of Shipley’s gift, the number of people living in urban areas worldwide was rapidly approaching parity with the number of people living in rural areas, drawing greater attention to the health challenges and disparities experienced by city dwellers. The establishment of a multidisciplinary professorship dedicated to urban health marked a pivotal moment in BU’s development as a global research leader poised to address society’s most pressing challenges.

Wellenius succeeds Patrick Kinney, who was the inaugural recipient of the professorship when he joined the Department of Environmental Health at the School of Public Health in 2017. Kinney, a world-renowned expert in air pollution and climate epidemiology, held the position for eight years before retiring in 2025. During his tenure, he catalyzed the growth of a university-wide ecosystem of scholarship at the intersection of explosive urbanization and a rapidly changing climate, attracting numerous like-minded scholars—including Wellenius, who joined SPH in 2020.

“This is such an incredible honor,” says Wellenius. “[Kinney] leaves such big shoes to fill. BU is one of the country’s largest urban universities and has extraordinary depth and breadth of expertise in this area, spanning departments and centers across both campuses. Professor Kinney’s pioneering scholarship in urban climate and health has been key to our outsized impact in this space.”

Wellenius’s research career mirrors Kinney’s in many ways. Trained as an environmental epidemiologist, Wellenius earned dual doctorate degrees from the Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Cardiovascular Division of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He served as an associate professor of epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health and director of Brown’s Center for Environmental Health and Technology before coming to BU.

While his early research primarily focused on the cardiovascular effects of ambient air pollution, his current work centers on climate and health. He has advanced both scientific and public understanding of the adverse health effects of climate-related hazards, such as extreme heat, severe storms, and air pollution from wildfires and other sources. In recent years, he has increasingly focused on evaluating strategies to reduce these threats with the goal of creating healthier, more resilient, and sustainable communities. Wellenius collaborates extensively with colleagues not only across different departments at SPH but also across campus in the BU Departments of Earth & Environment and Biology, the BU URBAN program, the BU Initiative on Cities, and at the Hariri Institute for Computational Science & Engineering.

At SPH, Wellenius teaches a graduate course on climate change and public health and serves as the inaugural director of SPH’s Center for Climate and Health. He previously served as a visiting scientist at Google and as a member of the executive committee of the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. He currently serves as a member of the research committee of the Health Effects Institute. In recognition of his achievements, Wellenius received the 2019 Tony McMichael Mid-Term Career Award from the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology and the 2025 Excellence in Research Mentoring Award from SPH.

According to Jonathan Levy, chair and professor in the Department of Environmental Health, Wellenius has helped transform BU’s climate and health research portfolio. “Greg took the baton in a lot of ways from Pat, who really helped us to launch in the world of climate and health. Greg saw the opportunity to build something very substantial,” says Levy “By 2024—in large part because of Greg’s wisdom and leadership—we’ve grown from less than $100,000 to more than $8 million in funding for climate and health. Just leaps and bounds from nothing to, I would argue, one of the top few institutions in the country doing climate and health research.”

In assuming the Beverly A. Brown professorship, Wellenius says he looks forward to building on Kinney’s legacy. “It’s personally very humbling and gratifying, but also such an important recognition of the strength that BU has, broadly speaking, in urban health and, more specifically, in the context of a changing climate and changing environment,” he says. “Our community’s collective efforts at the intersection of urban health and climate change is a perfect example of BU’s focus on convergent research. I’m proud and excited that BU continues to make significant investments in this critical area.”

“We’re extremely excited and gratified for Greg,” says Levy. “I think having the Bev Brown professorship will help him and help us to get to the next level.”

Brown, the professorship’s namesake, says she is delighted to see Wellenius make strides in carrying forth Kinney’s work to safeguard vulnerable populations from the health risks of a warming climate. “I cannot overstate the importance of what [Greg] is doing at the helm of the Center for Climate and Health,” she says. “It is really the trifecta of a public health effort: research, impact evaluation, and communication. We have enough questions. What we need are answers, and the Center is coming up with the right answers for what to do in this moment.”

She adds, “Public health is a relay race. The problems we deal with are deep-rooted and always evolving. Honoring Greg Wellenius with this professorship successfully passes the baton. I am thrilled at his selection.”