7 May, 2025
Last month, voting opened for the ERS Leadership Elections 2025, which presents candidates for ERS Vice President, Advocacy Council Chair, Education Council Chair, and Publications Committee Chair.
To help ERS members cast their vote, we will be shining a spotlight on each candidate. This week, we profile the candidates for Advocacy Council Chair.
The person elected as the next Advocacy Council Chair will start their shadow period in October, 2025, and their official mandate in September, 2026.
Candidate: Prof. Zorana Andersen
Zorana is Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, with over 20 years of experience researching the links between environmental factors and major chronic and infectious respiratory diseases. Utilising unique, high-quality registry data from Denmark and across Europe, Zorana and her team have advanced the understanding of how air pollution, temperature, and their interaction with physical activity in urban environments affect the risk of asthma, COPD, lung cancer, pneumonia, and COVID-19.
As Chair of the ERS Environment and Health Committee from 2020 to 2024, Zorana drew on research and global evidence to advocate – together with the WHO, environmental non-governmental organisations, researchers, respiratory health professionals, and patient communities – for cleaner air across Europe. This collaborative effort contributed to the revision of the EU Ambient Air Quality Directive in 2024, resulting in a historically strict air quality standards that will drive cleaner air and better lung health across the region.
Candidate: Prof. Jonathan Grigg
Jonathan is Professor of Paediatric Respiratory and Environmental Medicine at Queen Mary University of London, UK, as well as a researcher at the Institute of Asthma and Allergy Prevention, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany, and Honorary Professor at the University of Kwa Zulu-Natal, South Africa. Jonathan’s clinical and laboratory research focuses on the adverse effects of air pollution, and treatment of childhood wheeze. He has led multinational collaborations including a Global Health Research Group that identified a high burden of undiagnosed asthma in school children in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has advocated reducing children’s exposure to air pollution in the media and founded “Doctors against Diesel” in the UK. He has advised policy makers as a member of the UK Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollution, and the WHO Global Air Pollution and Health Technical Advisory Group.
Jonathan has been co-lead of an ERS clinical research collaboration on biologics for paediatric asthma, Head of the ERS Paediatric Assembly, Chair of the ERS Tobacco Control Committee, and is currently a member of the Advocacy Committee. In these roles, he has warned about vaping by young people, and advocated for increasing the age of sale of nicotine products to 21 years.
The deadline for voting is 23:59 CEST on Sunday 22 June. ERS members can visit the ‘Elections’ tab on myERS to vote.