Lidia Morawska is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, at QUT; the Director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH) at QUT, which is a WHO Collaborating Centre on Air Quality and Health; a Co-Director in Australia for the Australia – China Centre for Air Quality Science and Management (ACC-AQSM); a Vice-Chancellor Fellow at the Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), University of Surrey in the UK; and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Environmental and Climate Research (ECI), Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. She conducts fundamental and applied research in the interdisciplinary field of air quality and its impact on human health and the environment, with a specific focus on science of airborne particulate matter. She has been involved at the executive level with several relevant national and international professional bodies and has been acting as an advisor to the World Health Organization.

She is a physicist 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. She spent from 1987 to 1991 conducting 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. In 1992, she established the Environmental Aerosol Laboratory at QUT, renamed the ILAQH in 2002, when it became a WHO Collaborating Centre for Air Quality and Health. She then took up a position as Associate Professor at the QUT, in 2003. She is a long-standing collaborator and advisor to the World Health Organization, and has contributed to all WHO air quality-related guidelines since 1990, including co-chairing the Guideline Development Group (2006 to 2021), responsible for numerous standards. She is Associate Editor of Science of the Total Environment journal since 2010.

In recognition of her contributions to the field, D/Prof Morawska was elected a fellow to the Australian Academy of Science in 2020; and was the recipient of the 2020 QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Leadership Excellence. She was also the recipient of a 2018 Eureka Prize for Infectious Diseases Research (Australian Museum of Eureka Prizes), as well as the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR) 2017 David Sinclair Award, where in his nomination of her for this award, D/Prof Tunga Salthammer of the Fraunhofer WKI (Germany) stated that she “…has long been considered as one of the top researchers in the field of aerosol science, covering a broad scientific spectrum including, radon, traffic exhaust, indoor related particle emissions, modeling and occupational exposure. For more than 30 years, she has worked in challenging and important areas of aerosol research, with her outstanding results of substantial value for other researchers”.  She was also the recipient of a QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Performance Award 2017 “in recognition of a significant and superior contribution to the work of the university”, and in 2011, the Clean Air Medal, Clean Air Society of Australia and New Zealand (CASANZ) for “…sustained and dedicated contribution to the understanding of fine particles in the air”.  In addition, D/Prof Morawska was named one of Australia’s top 40 researchers in The Australian Research Magazine (2020). Ranked in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend’s 40 Australians Who Mattered: Health and Science (November 2020), and Ranked 16,428 in the Stanford University ranking of 100,000 Top Scientists.