John Colbourne

Background

About John Colbourne

Since arriving in Birmingham in 2012, I have led the grass-roots international Environment Care Consortium whose mission statement commits “to offer leadership at making the environment safe from toxic chemicals that poison the water, soil and air”. The Consortium now numbers over 100 science, legal and public health experts & students that confront the global health and justice problems caused by pollution. Our solution is 'action research' that uses precision toxicology and environmental governance to reduce the burden of pollution, based on vastly improved opportunities for effective recourse. In partnership with the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, I co-founded the charitable arm of this organization based in the USA. The Environment Care Foundation was launched in 2019. The Consortium’s focus is on the growing public health crisis in low- and middle-income countries, where one in four people die because of exposure to pollution. In parallel, and to introduce our precision toxicology to control pollution in high-income countries, I co-founded a business in December 2018. Michabo Health Science provides scientific solutions to better understand the root causes of exposure-related harm, so that chemical toxicity can be prevented, and remedies can be found to support health and economic growth. The Precision Toxicology initiative received significant grant funding from the European Commission in 2021, which assembles 15 institutions from the Environment Care Consortium to better protect human health and the environment by using non-traditional test species, multiple fields of knowledge, and powerful computational approaches to understand which chemicals are toxic and why.