About
Recent presentation of our report to the COVID-19 Inquiry here.
Recent inaugural lecture here.
I’m the W.H. Duncan Professor of Health Inequalities; Professor of Public Health and Policy; NIHR Research Professor; and Honorary Consultant in Public Health at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital with expertise in public health, health inequalities, paediatrics and child health, epidemiology and statistics, and evidence synthesis.
I lead the Health Inequalities Policy Research Group HIP-R with my colleagues Ben Barr and Sarah Rodgers. Our vision is to improve health and reduce inequalities through the study of the determinants of health and wellbeing and the policies that impact them.
Within HIP-R my research focuses on addressing child health inequalites. My NIHR Research Professorship (2022-27) is entitled “Tackling child health inequality. An interventional epidemiology platform to inform policy.” My professorship aims to bring together data to evaluate the effects of interventions and policies to help reduce child health inequalities in the UK and to inform policy decisions internationally. This involves social epidemiological analysis of population level linked datasets and birth cohort studies in the UK and Denmark, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, where I'm an Affiliate Professor of Child Public Health in the Section of Epidemiology.
I’m an academic director for Health Equity North. Check out our reports here, especially the N8/NHSA Child of the North report.
I'm an investigator on the Wellcome Trust funded Children Growing Up in Liverpool (C-GULL) birth cohort and civic data linkage.
I’m the lead for LiLaC - the Liverpool-Lancaster collaboration - within the NIHR School for Public Health Research; and an investigator for the NIHR Public Health Policy Research Unit; and a member of INRICH.
I led the child health component of the Due North Inquiry on Health Equity for the North (2014); and a Cochrane review of global child deworming policies.
In my clinical public health work, I sit on the Health and Wellbeing Board and work with Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool City Council and UNICEF to develop more effective and equitable services for children in the city.
From 2017-22 I was funded on an MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship. Prior to this I was funded by the MRC on a Population Health Scientist Fellowship, and then a Centenary Award. I was a Clinical Lecturer in Public Health and a Specialist Registrar on the Mersey Deanery Public Health Training scheme (2004 to 2014). I originally trained in paediatrics at Alder Hey in Liverpool, following two years of clinical practice in Australia, and subsequently worked as a research fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
Selected media and presentations: See recent select committee regarding child poverty here; Public Health England keynote presentation here; interview about children in care here; interview about global deworming in children on BBC Radio 4 “More or Less” here; article about austerity and Liverpool here.
Prizes or Honours
- Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer, Institute for Child Health, UCL (UCL, 2014)
- Postgraduate Statistics Centre Prize for Excellence in Learning (Lancaster University, 2011)
- European CF Society: Best abstract: Pulmonology (ECFS, 2011)
- William MacAdam Prize in Medicine (University of Leeds, 1998)
Funded Fellowships
- MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship (Medical Research Council (MRC), 2017)
- MRC Centenary Award (Medical Research Council (MRC), 2012)
- MRC Population Health Scientist Fellowship (2009-2012, 2009)