FigureTony McMichael, who sadly died in September 2014, was an outstanding and visionary epidemiologist and public health scientist who was particularly renowned for his pioneering work on climate change and health. Tony graduated in Medicine at the University of Adelaide and then undertook a PhD in Preventive Medicine at Monash University. His work on occupational hazards at a postdoctoral position at the University of North Carolina included seminal contributions to understanding the “healthy worker effect.” Back in Australia, he made important advances to understanding the health effects of lead exposure and the epidemiology of multiple sclerosis—pointing in particular to the possible role of ultraviolet radiation exposure. Any of these major advances would have given Tony a global reputation as a leading epidemiologist, but it is for his work on climate change and health that he became best known and where his long-term legacy is greatest. His first book Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species, published in 1993, is a classic. At the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (1994–2001), he took a leading role in UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and associated WHO activities focused on estimating health impacts of past and future anthropogenic climate change, as well as on epidemiologic studies that could better inform such assessments. Tony was a champion of epidemiology applied broadly to public health and also advocated that the concerns of that wider world influence the practice and scope of epidemiology. He urged that to stay relevant, epidemiology should escape the “prison” of focus just on proximate health risk factors and expand to address more distal, possibly complex, societal, and temporal influences on health and engage in projecting the health effects of large-scale environmental perturbations, notably climate change. Tony returned to Australia in 2001 as director of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health and continued a leading role in epidemiology internationally, including as president of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology 2008–2010. A Festschrift to commemorate his extraordinary career was held in 2012. An associated open-access book will appear next year. Tony was a warm and engaging friend to many and an inspirational teacher and lecturer, who will be greatly missed across the world epidemiologic and public health community.