Medical doctor, anthropologist, bioethicist.
Lydie Fialová studied medicine, philosophy, and cultural history in Prague and Tübingen, social anthropology in Edinburgh and London, with research and clinical internships in Spain, Mexico, and Israel, and postdoctoral fellowship in the history and philosophy of science in Boston. After brief period of clinical training in child psychiatry, and while conducting ethnographic research in psychiatric hospitals, she had been teaching biomedical ethics, anthropology, and humanities for over a decade, most recently at Edinburgh Medical School as a theme head for medical ethics, and deputy director of the Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Sciences, and the Law.
Taking a career break while living with her family in the Scottish Highlands and home-educating her children, she returned to her interest in environmental ethics, ecology, and ecological humanities, and participating on local projects of landscape regeneration and nature education. She has also been contributing as as writer, researcher and consultant to international projects in ecological medicine and planetary health, ethics, and medical education, collaborating with Heidelberg University, Charles University, The New School of the Anthropocene, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. She designed and is involved in collaborative teaching of two courses for international medical students: ‘Being Alive. Humans in the Web of Life’ based on readings from biology, anthropology, and philosophy; and ‘Health Impacts of the Ecological and Climate Crises’, addressing the complexities of pollution, natural habitats and biodiversity destruction, and changes in climatic and hydrological conditions.
After moving to Berlin she joined PIK as a visiting researcher in 2025, working on an integrative, participative research project in planetary health. She is interested in methodological and conceptual issues of interdisciplinary collaboration, community- and place-based research approaches, and in the ethical dimension of planetary transformations.
Contact
14412 Potsdam
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maxmilians-Universität München
Lydie Fialova's current research project, 'Making planetary health relevant locally: Designing an integrative diagnostic framework for participatory, community- and place-based research and systemic intervention design', aims to complement the aggregative scientific approaches in the area of planetary health with a grass-root initiative in the form of community research, by developing a diagnostic framework to be used by local communities for participatory, place-based research, allowing them to map a wide range of determinants of planetary health in an integrative and comprehensive manner. Using this diagnostic framework to map determinants of ecological and human health across six domains - land/soil, air, water, biodiversity, human communities, and infrastructures - over extended periods of time will allow the communities to capture the temporal dynamics of ecological processes. The community research process, combining participative action research and citizen science approaches, will also assist communities with the identification of root causes and drivers of ecological change and provide an evidence base for the design of systemic interventions, implementation of preventative, mitigative, and restorative adaptive approaches to address aspects of the environmental crises relevant to that place, and ground them for informed negotiations and advocacy.
The research process includes the identification and development of unified metrics, in close collaboration with experts in particular areas (ecology, biogeochemistry, environmental health, ecotoxicology, law, etc.), and their integration into a diagnostic framework for reliable and comprehensive data gathering, potentially in combination with biomonitoring methods. The diagnostic framework will then be used as part of ethnographic research in collaboration with a range of local communities with distinct ecologies, but also epistemologies and ethics, that shape their understandings of planetary health, capturing the plurality of experiences and ways of knowing and relating to the living world.
