Dr Sahran Higgins is an ecologist who works at the intersection of ecology and humans.

She has public sector background in freshwater ecology and water quality monitoring and on moving into academia, she attained a PhD in Evolutionary Ecology. Sahran’s post-doctoral research seeks to understand the way that human population health responds to different ecosystem types (ESRC funded ‘Beyond Greenspace’) and to the impacts of changing climate (EU FP7 project ‘Bottom-Up Climate Adaptation Strategies Towards a Sustainable Europe’ Project).

She is also exploring how the quality of our natural environment and the quality of our health are closely interlinked (Horizon 2020 project “Inter-sectoral Health and Environment Research for Innovation”).

Currently, Sahran is working on understanding how environmental and ecological factors may contribute to the risk of human exposure to antibiotic resistant bacteria in coastal waters of Hong Kong.

This is supported by the Environment, Sustainability and Resilience (ENSURE) joint research centre, between Exeter and Chinese University of Hong Kong for applied interdisciplinary research. She is also a strong advocate for cross-disciplinary and cross-sector working as a way to tackle globally important ecology-human health issues.

Research interests:

Landscape ecology and spatial modelling

Health effects of ecological responses to environmental change

Urban ecology and nature based solutions

Microbial ecology