Irene Mussio
Lecturer in Economics at Leeds University Business School. She studies how people perceive and trade off risks to their health and their surroundings, and co-founded this network so that human decision-making would sit alongside the engineering rather than after it.
What Irene does in the network
Irene is one of three directors who set the network's direction, decide what it funds and keep it honest about whether the research is reaching anyone outside the university.
Her discipline is the one that keeps the network pointed at people. A building only delivers health if somebody opens the window, runs the fan, accepts the retrofit or trusts the reading on the monitor. Irene studies how people perceive risk and what they will give up to reduce it, and she tests it with experiments rather than assuming it. That is the difference between a ventilation strategy that works on paper and one that works in an actual house.
The research behind it
Her work is on how people perceive and respond to risks to their health and their environment, using experimental and behavioural methods. Current projects look at how environmental hazards shape behaviour and risk perception, how preferences shift under different health conditions, and what happens when mindfulness techniques are brought into economic experiments.
Her publication list is maintained on her Leeds staff profile.
Ask Irene about
- How people actually weigh risks to their health and their homes
- Risk-risk trade-offs, and why reducing one risk can raise another
- Designing economic experiments that test behaviour instead of assuming it
- Putting a value on something with no market price, such as cleaner indoor air
- Why a technically correct intervention can still fail once people are involved
- Bringing social science into an engineering-led project
In the network
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Co-founded the network, summer 2024
Started with Martín López-García and Marco-Felipe King as a Horizons Challenge Network at the University of Leeds. See the full story.
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Co-editor, UKIEG 2025 Book of Abstracts
Edited with Martín López-García and Marco-Felipe King, published with ISBN 978-1-914241-91-8. View the publication.
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Speaking for HBN at the World Ventilation Day round table
Putting the network's case on legally binding indoor air quality limits, 6 November 2026. Event page.
For press and comms
Approved copy you can lift straight into a programme, a press release or an event listing.
Name and style
- Full name
- Irene Mussio
- No accents.
- Later mentions
- Mussio
- Title
- Lecturer in Economics
- Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds.
- Network role
- Co-Founder and Director
- Healthy Buildings Network Leeds.
One line
Irene Mussio is Lecturer in Economics at Leeds University Business School and a co-founder and director of the Healthy Buildings Network Leeds.
Fifty words
Irene Mussio is Lecturer in Economics at Leeds University Business School and a co-founder and director of the Healthy Buildings Network Leeds. She works in behavioural and environmental economics, studying how people perceive and trade off risks to their health and their surroundings, and testing it experimentally.
Hundred words
Irene Mussio is Lecturer in Economics at Leeds University Business School and a co-founder and director of the Healthy Buildings Network Leeds. Her research spans behavioural, environmental and health economics, with a focus on the economics of risk and uncertainty and on economic valuation. She uses experiments to study how people perceive environmental and health hazards and what they are willing to trade to reduce them, work that connects human decision-making with building design and public health. She co-founded the network in 2024 and co-edited the UKIEG 2025 Book of Abstracts.
Headshot
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