Tolu(llah) Oni is a clinical professor of Global Public Health and Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Cambridge and Founder & CEO of UrbanBetter. She is also an honorary professor in Public Health, University of Cape Town where she lived and worked for over a decade. 

Born in Lagos, she is a pan-African British public health physician and urban epidemiologist living in the diaspora with affinities in Nigeria, South Africa and the UK, working with deep commitment across the African continent and globally. She occupies many worlds: medicine and urbanism, science and science diplomacy, academia and advocacy, global South and North; and has learned to navigate the spaces between them with both urgency and care. Her work supports a coordinated approach between science, policy and societal role players, using mixed, participatory and transdisciplinary methods to identify creative and long-term strategies to address complex urban population and planetary health challenges in rapidly growing cities. She has spent the last 15 years of her career working at the intersection of urbanisation, climate and health, driven by a single, urgent conviction: we cannot medicalise our way to a healthy future. We must instead design our environments to simultaneously tackle the climate crisis and to create and sustain health. 

She has served as scientific adviser for several organisations including the World Health Organization, UN DESA, International Society for Urban Health, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Planetary health board and the World Obesity Federation. She is an editorial board member of PLOS Global Public Health, Lancet Planetary Health, Cities and Health, and the Journal of Urban Health. 

With over 150 academic publications, she has been profiled in the Lancet journal, Science magazine and the British Medical Journal, and is a Fellow of the International Science Council, African Academy of Sciences, Next Einstein Forum Fellow and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.