CIEH Members' Day

Celestine Cheong FRSA AMEI, Head of External Communications, UK Atomic Energy Authority. For just shy of a decade, Celestine worked in the fire sector - first with the Business Sprinkler Alliance through Ogilvy, then the Fire Sector Federation and The Fire Protection Association - lobbying for amends to the flawed Approved Document B that still support the Building Regulations today.

Celestine's work focused on highlighting business resilience through enhanced fire safety and exposing the weaknesses in the system to various building and fire ministers and civil servants and that contribution was featured in “Grenfell Uncovered”, the 2026 BAFTA TV Award for Best Single Documentary.

Professor Chris Elliott, PhD, FRSC, FRSB, MRIA, OBE, Founder, Institute for Global Food Security, Queen's University, Belfast. Chris is the founder of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast and is a Honorary Professor there now. He is also Professor of Food Security at Thamassat University in Thailand. He has published around 600 peer-reviewed articles on the detection and control of agriculture, food, and environmental-related contaminants. Chris led the independent review of Britain’s food system following the 2013 horsemeat scandal and now acts as a scientific advisor for a range of United Nations Agencies, governments, and industries on a range of food security topics. Over the years Chris has developed a high level network of collaborators across Europe, the United States , the Middle East and Asia. He is a recipient of a Winston Churchill Fellowship and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Royal Society of Biology. Chris has received numerous prizes and awards for his work such as the Royal Society of Chemistry Theophilus Redwood Prize and an OBE in 2017. He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2020 and became Vice President of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health in 2021 and Honorary President of the Society of Food Hygiene and Technology in 2023.

David Travers KC, Gough Square Chambers. David Travers KC (LLM, 1980) is a barrister at Gough Square Chambers and acts for local authorities and other regulatory bodies throughout England and Wales. A very large part of his practice involves heath and safety and consumer protection matters (including food safety and unsafe products). He is also involved in environmental and environmental health cases (including waste and statutory nuisance). He also appears in Inquests and Inquiries and is acting for the Coal Authority in the upcoming Inquest in Swansea into the Gleision mining disaster.

His private sector clients range from major commercial and industrial concerns to small businesses, and individuals.

David has extensive experience of cases involving complex scientific or technical evidence.
He has been identified as a leader in his fields of practice in the leading independent directories: Legal 500, Chambers & Partners, Best Lawyers, and Who’s Who Legal, and has been named “Consumer Barrister of the Year” and “Food Barrister of the Year” a number of times.
For most of the last decade David was Visiting Professor in Business Accountability at the University of South Wales.  https://goughsq.co.uk/barrister/david-travers-kc/ 

Fran McCloskey, Chief Executive Officer, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH). Fran McCloskey joined CIEH in 2022. Fran is a qualified chartered accountant who has worked in the charity sector for over 20 years, and before that was with KPMG's mergers and acquisitions team. As an Executive Team Member for many years in several organisations, Fran has a lot of experience in Corporate Strategy and Performance as well as Transformation.

Dr Henry Dawson CEnvH MCIEH, Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for Environmental Health at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Henry’s research interests focus on regulatory interventions for housing and health. His recent work includes tenant consultation in social housing, national analysis of property licensing schemes, an empty properties handbook for Wales and authoring of the updates to the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) Operating Guidance. Henry sits on the Wales Housing Expert Panel, the Rent Smart Wales Advisory Panel, the working group for Part K of the Building Regulations and the CIEH Housing Advisory Panel.

Joanna Seymour, Head of Environmental Health Workforce Programme, CIEH. Joanna Seymour is a UKPHR-registered Public Health Practitioner and Registered Environmental Health Practitioner, currently Head of the Environmental Health Workforce Programme at CIEH. She has extensive experience across housing, environmental health, and public health, with a particular focus on improving housing conditions for vulnerable populations and tackling fuel poverty.

Joanna brings extensive leadership and delivery experience across environmental health, housing, and public health. Prior to joining CIEH, she was Partnerships Director at Warm Wales, where she combined strategic project development with operational delivery, staff management, and the identification and cultivation of new partnerships. She led on the development of new project opportunities aimed at tackling fuel poverty and improving health outcomes.

Earlier in her career, Joanna held senior housing and environmental health roles across a range of local authorities. At Flintshire County Council, within Housing Standards, she focused on improving housing conditions for the most vulnerable tenants, working closely with homelessness prevention, housing options, bond teams, and tenancy support services. Her role included investigating complaints of harassment and illegal eviction.

At Wirral Council, Joanna managed the Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) Team and led Healthy Homes, a multi-agency initiative delivering cost-effective home improvements with significant health benefits. This work particularly improved housing standards in the private rented sector for vulnerable households and those experiencing fuel poverty.

Joanna has also worked for Chester City Council, Wrexham County Borough Council, and Manchester City Council, including within a busy reactive housing enforcement team dealing with complex housing complaints and large HMOs.

She qualified as an Environmental Health Practitioner from Birmingham University in 2005, completing an MSc in Environmental Health.

Sterling Crew, Public Health Advocate. Sterling is a food safety advocate with 40 years’ experience working in food safety, security, authenticity and global supply chain governance. He is a trustee of CIEH and sits on the CIEH Food Advisory Panel. He also chairs The Food Authenticity Network, and is Immediate Past President of the Institute of Food Science and Technology. And has recently joined the board of the Saudis Food and Drink Administration. Sterling holds a number of food related board positions, and acts as an independent scientific and regulatory advisor. Sterling started his career in government before a successful track history in retail, manufacturing and the branded world. His experience as a regulator, retailer, brand owner and food manufacturer has given him a unique perspective on the challenges of the global food supply system.

Dr Stephen Battersby, Freelance Environmental Health and Housing Consultant. Dr Stephen Battersby is a retired freelance environmental health and housing consultant, and researcher. He was CIEH President from 2008-2011 and is currently a Vice President.  In 2014 he was awarded an MBE in the Birthday Honours List for services to Environmental Health.

He is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Centre for Environment and Sustainability the University of Surrey.

In the past he has chaired the Pro-Housing Alliance, and the Board of Generation Rent and has been a member of the Healthier Housing Partnership and an Associate of the Safe and Healthy Housing Unit at the University of Warwick.  Over the years he has also undertaken research for several MPs.

He has been Editor of Clay’s Handbook of Environmental Health for the past three editions and is the series editor for the Routledge Focus on Environmental Health series of monographs and has written or contributed to a number of titles in the series (https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Focus-on-Environmental-Health/book-series/CONENHE) including on Dampness in Dwellings.

Stephen Turner, Vice President, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) & Director, Stephen Turner Acoustics Limited. Stephen Turner is an Independent Acoustics Consultant at Stephen Turner Acoustics Limited. He has been working in the field of acoustics and noise control for over 45 years in a career which has spanned both the public and private sector. He was a technical adviser to noise policy officials at the UK's Defra for over 15 years, including 4 years as a civil servant, during which time he was closely involved in the development and implementation of noise management policy in England. He is a former President and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Acoustics (IOA) an individual member of the European Commission’s Noise Expert Group and a former Chair of the British Standards Committee that deals with transportation noise.

Susie Kennedy, Senior Partner, KBA Solutions Limited. Susie Kennedy is Senior Partner of KBA Solutions Limited, which she founded in 1993. KBA specialises in Executive Development and Change Leadership consulting. Susie is Programme Director for KBA’s award winning Institute of Leadership and Management Strategic Leadership Programme with bespoke versions for Local Government at Kings College London and sister programmes in Premier Foods and the University of Cambridge.

Susie has helped develop more than 4000 leaders in a wide range of private and public sector organisations including Proctor & Gamble, Heathrow, Maersk Shipping, Fire Authorities and more than 220 Local Authorities across the UK. She has led on numerous successful organisational change and culture change consulting projects using KBA’s renown 3D Approach to Change Leadership.

She is an Executive Coach, a member of the Peter Drucker Society and a Thinkers50 contributor with publications in The Transformation Playbook; Transforming Beyond the Crisis; Perpetual Transformation, Building Resilient Organizations and most recently, Connectedness: How the Best Leaders Create Authentic Human Connections in a Disconnected World.

She is among the founding members of the Drucker Health Forum, a global network for improving health.

Tim Lang, Professor Emeritus of Food Policy, Centre for Food Policy, School of Health Sciences, City St George's, University of London. After hill farming in Lancashire in the 1970s, Tim focussed on food policy across health, environment, politics and culture. He set up and directed the Centre for Food Policy 1994-2018 to research and educate about food system dynamics. After Brexit, he focussed on the UK, writing Feeding Britain (Pelican 2020). Currently, he researches and advises on the state of civil food resilience, asking whether society is prepared for food shocks. His Just in Case report (National Preparedness Commission, February 2025) provided a sober, widely cited analysis.

Una Kane Msc CMCIEH, Environmental Health Manager, Rother and Wealden District Council. Una is the Environmental Health Manager of the food and safety team at Rother and Wealden District Council. She is a Chartered Environmental Health Practitioner with over thirty five years’ experience. In this time, Una has seen the food safety regulation regime move from joining of the single market, and through the introduction of the food hygiene rating scheme – which she describes as the “crown jewels” of food hygiene, leaving the EU and regulating outside the EU.