Rate My Professor Nicholas Osborne

Associate Professor Nicholas Osborne serves as Associate Professor in Environmental Health at the School of Public Health, University of Queensland, and leads the Environmental Epidemiology team at the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences. He holds a BSc(Hons), MAgSc from the University of Queensland completed in 2000 on tannin-protein interactions in ruminants, and a PhD in 2004 from the School of Population Health, University of Queensland, investigating the toxicology and public health aspects of the marine cyanobacterium Lyngbya majuscula. As an epidemiologist and toxicologist, Osborne specializes in environmental epidemiology to examine disease aetiology and pathological pathways. His research encompasses environmental exposures and health outcomes, including metals, pollen, mould, chronic low-level chemicals, pesticides, and cyanotoxins. He investigates how greenspaces, bluespaces, and solar irradiance enhance health and wellbeing via vitamin D pathways, and links environmental and population health data interdisciplinarily. Current foci include pollen-health relationships using eDNA methods, thunderstorm asthma, food allergy environmental determinants, chronic kidney disease of unknown origin in low- and middle-income countries potentially tied to pesticides and heavy metals, dengue prediction, and climate change impacts like heatwaves on health.

Osborne's career includes appointments at the Universities of New South Wales, Sydney, Exeter, Melbourne, Portsmouth, Flinders, and Queensland, alongside roles at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Cancer Council Victoria. Key publications feature 'Indoor fungal diversity and asthma: a meta-analysis and systematic review of risk factors' (Sharpe et al., 2015, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology), 'Pollen exposure and hospitalization due to asthma exacerbations: Daily time series in a European city' (Osborne et al., 2017, International Journal of Biometeorology), 'Environmental DNA reveals links between abundance and composition of airborne grass pollen and respiratory health' (2021), and recent contributions such as 'Disentangling the role of environmental factors in the CKDu epidemic' (Osborne, 2026, Nature Reviews Nephrology), 'Greenspace exposure and associated health outcomes: an updated systematic review of reviews' (Bryer et al., 2026, F1000Research), and 'Climate effect on the incidence of kidney failure patients in Australia' (Tesfaw et al., 2025, BMC Medicine). His two decades of research on toxic fireweed earned rare recognition from the World Health Organisation, contributing to global guidelines on environmental toxins and public health policy.