Tess Osborne

Dr Tess Osborne is a health geographer whose work explores the real-time, embodied experience of health and wellbeing, examining how environments are felt, navigated and lived through the body in an increasingly digitalising world. Her research develops a distinctive biosocial approach, integrating physiological sensing with qualitative and spatial methods to capture how stress, recovery and emotional experience are shaped by place, with a particular focus on inequalities in access to healthy environments and how these inequalities become embodied.

Tess's primary methodological interest lies in the critical use of wearable physiological sensors within geography, an approach she has applied across urban stress research, digital and virtual geographies, migrant mobility and belonging, and the wellbeing of older adults. She also contributes to the growing field of digital geography, examining how digital technologies, infrastructures and data practices reshape embodied experience, social participation and access to care. This concern with wellbeing, participation and care under uneven socio-technical conditions extends to her work on ageing, mobility and informal dementia care, through which she has developed new concepts within health and wellbeing geography, including metastability in rhythmanalysis and 'caring with'.
Tess received an MSci in Geography and a PhD in Geography and Environmental Science from the University of Birmingham. She began her academic career as a Research and Teaching Associate in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at Birmingham (2015–2019), before moving to the University of Groningen, where she held posts as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Population Research Centre and Lecturer in the Faculty of Spatial Sciences (2019–2022). She then joined the University of Leicester as Lecturer in Human Geography (2022–2026) and joined the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Reading in 2026 as Lecturer in Human Geography.

Tess continues to hold an Honorary Research Fellowship at the University of Birmingham and has held an External Lectureship at the University of Innsbruck and Research Fellowship at the University of Groningen. She is Editor-in-Chief of Digital Geography and Society and Chair of the Digital Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and has held roles including Communications Officer for the Society's Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group