Lidia Morawska (born 10 November 1952, Tarnów, Poland) is a Polish–Australian physicist, Australian Laureate Fellow and distinguished professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, at the Queensland University of Technology, director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH) and ARC Training Centre for Advanced Building Systems Against Airborne Infection Transmission (Thrive) at QUT. She is past co-director of the Australia-China Centre for Air Quality Science and Management, an adjunct professor at the Jinan University in China, and a Vice-Chancellor fellow at the Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. Her work focuses on fundamental and applied research in the interdisciplinary field of air quality and its impact on human health, with a specific focus on atmospheric fine, ultrafine and nanoparticles. Since 2003, she expanded her interests to include also particles from human respiration activities and airborne infection transmission. In 2018, she received the Eureka Prize for Infectious Diseases Research, as well as the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR) 2017 David Sinclair Award. In 2020, she contributed to the area of airborne infection transmission of viruses, including COVID-19. In that same year she became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science () and received the QUT Distinguished Professorship, and received the 2021 International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate Special 2020 Award for an Extraordinary Academic Leadership. In 2021, she was included on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2024, she was elected as an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2025, she was awarded the Prime Minister Prize for Science by the Prime Minister of Australia The Hon Anthony Albanese MP, received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Lublin University of Technology, Poland for her global work in air quality research and its effects on human health and the environment, and was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.
Life and career She was born in 1952 in Tarnów to father Henryk Jaskuła, a yachtsman and sailing captain, and mother Zofia. At the age of two, she moved with her family to Przemyśl where she grew up. She studied physics and received her doctorate in 1982 at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland for research on radon and its progeny. From 1982 to 1987, she was a research fellow at the Institute of Physics and Nuclear Techniques, Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, Cracow, Poland. Prior to joining the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 1991, she conducted research first at McMaster University in Hamilton as a postdoctoral research fellow of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and later at the University of Toronto between 1987 and 1991. She has conducted research in this field since 1991, when she established the Environmental Aerosol Laboratory at QUT, renamed the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health in 2002. She subsequently assumed a position as associate professor at the QUT in 2003. She is a long-standing collaborator and advisor to the World Health Organization, contributing to all WHO air quality-related guidelines over the past two decades. She co-chairs the group responsible for the WHO Air Quality Guidelines, on which nations base their air quality standards. In addition, was an Associate Editor of Science of the Total Environment journal, (2007-2021).
Research Her research interests and scientific contributions fall into eight main areas: (i) Instrumental techniques for ultrafine particle detection in the air; (ii) Combustion as a source of urban atmospheric pollution; (iii) The science of ambient particle dynamics; (iv) Indoor Air Quality; (v) Lung Deposition; (vi) Risk assessment and mitigation; (vii) Developing and utilising advanced networks for air quality sensing and analyses; and (viii) particles from respiratory activities and infection control. She has received funding from different sources and for different research projects including:
COVID-19 research During the COVID-19 pandemic, she assembled and led a multidisciplinary group of 239 scientists guiding public health authorities worldwide to recognise the significance of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus-laden particles and the risk it poses to human health. Based on this work, the WHO and other national authorities such as the US Center for Disease Control, subsequently updated their advice regarding airborne transmission. In 2020, she became a Member of the Task Force on Workplace, School, and Travel Safety, The Lancet COVID Commission, looking into building-related risk factors which are a critical, but missing, component of SARS-CoV-2 outbreak investigations.
Ultrafine particle research Her "Ultrafine Particles from Traffic Emissions and Children's Health" project demonstrated that exposure to airborne ultrafine particles emitted in large quantities from vehicles was independently, positively associated with both systemic and respiratory inflammation and therefore has significant deleterious health impacts. In 2015, this evidence convinced the World Health Organization and individual countries to review national standards to protect children by controlling their exposure to ultrafine particles. As a result, they changed their air quality guidelines to include recommendations regarding ultrafine particles. In 2019, she led the "Thinking outside the box" team which prepared a White Paper titled "Ambient ultrafine particles: evidence for policy makers”, and in 2021, had input into the good practices for the management of ultrafine particles in the new WHO Global Air Quality Guidelines.
Global Burden of Diseases studies Since 2012, she has also contributed work on international scientific programs, such as the Global Burden of Disease studies which quantitatively assess the impact of exposure to air pollution as a disease risk.
Honours and awards Her scientific career has been recognised and awarded in multiple occasions by various organisations, among those are:
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