Kate Venables

Kate Venables read Medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and was a junior doctor in general and respiratory medicine before a prize-winning Master’s at The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She became a lecturer at LSHTM, then Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College. She moved to Oxford in 1998 as University Lecturer, now Emeritus Reader, and is a Fellow of St Cross College. 

Kate's research has always focussed on aetiological epidemiology, with over 100 scientific publications. At NHLI, her research on occupational asthma included studies of exposure-response relations, interactions with smoking, and methods in occupational epidemiology.

She spent a sabbatical year at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, working with US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health on the prevention of occupational asthma. Later, she described a large outbreak of thunderstorm-related asthma which affected London and the South-East.

At Oxford, she led a large, MRC-funded, cohort study of mortality and cancer incidence in military veterans exposed to low levels of chemical warfare agents in experiments at Porton Down between 1940 and 1989. A follow-up study, also MRC-funded, is underway in collaboration with King's College London.  

She ran medical student teaching on occupational and environmental health within Oxford Population Health undergraduate course and taught and examined on the MSc course. She ran the 22^nd international conference on occupational epidemiology at Oxford in 2011 and in 2013 published Current Topics in Occupational Epidemiology with Oxford University Press. She is currently researching medicine in the Burma campaign in World War 2 for a book about her father.