Profile

Paula Santana is a Geographer and retired Full Professor at the University of Coimbra. She is an integrated member of the Center for Geography and Spatial Planning Studies, where she served as Scientific Coordinator between 2019 and 2021, and has coordinated the Health Geography Research Team since 2008. She has dedicated herself to teaching (at the Department of Geography and Tourism of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra and as a visiting professor at USP – Brazil, the Universities of Turku and Helsinki, Finland), research and publication in the areas of health geography, urban geography, healthy urban planning, population health assessment, geographical patterns of avoidable mortality and mental health. She is the (co)author of 18 books, around 200 articles in scientific journals, mostly international and indexed (110 SCOPUS, with 4,835 citations, h-index 28), as well as a vast number of book chapters. He is on the editorial board of several journals (e.g. Health & Place, Social Science and Medicine, Cities & Health).

She has coordinated several competitively funded scientific projects, both national (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) and European (H2020: EURO-HEALTHY – Shaping EUROpean policies to promote HEALTH equity, between 2015 and 2018. She has also coordinated several projects in the field of specialized support services for the local, regional and national community. These include the Atlas of Healthy Municipalities (Portuguese Network of Healthy Municipalities), the Demography of Health Professionals (Ministry of Health), the Forecast Need for Doctors (Portuguese Medical Association) and the Emergency Care Network (Ministry of Health).  She is an honorary member of the International Geographical Union, Commission on Health and Environment (IGU-CHE), having been Co-President from 2018 to 2021. She has been a Corresponding Member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences since 2023 and a Corresponding Member of the Geographical Society of Finland since 1999. She has been awarded 4 scientific recognition prizes (e.g., Bial Prize for Clinical Medicine; Women in Science).

Scopus Author ID: 7003526784; ResearcherID: V-9161-2017; Science ID: 6D16-BF67-4EEE; ORCID: 0000-0002-7658-8475