PHRC - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Deputy Director of the Centre for Reviews

Professor Amanda Sowden is Deputy Director of the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York. Amanda has been involved in evidence synthesis for over fifteen years. Amanda's research interests are focused on evaluating the effects of complex interventions, particularly those used in public health on health and health inequalities. She has contributed to method development including the production of guidance on narrative synthesis and the publication of a method for synthesising evidence about the differential effects of interventions. She is a member of the PHRC Consortium Management Group. She is also an advisory group member for the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools (one of six National Collaborating Centres for Public Health in Canada) and on the Steering Group for the Health Promotion and Public Health Reviews Facility (EPPI-Centre, University of London). She has served on The Quality Assurance Board for The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) and on the Campbell Collaboration Steering Group.

Professor Ashley Adamson is Professor of Public Health Nutrition at the Human Nutrition Research Centre at the Institute of Health & Society, University of Newcastle. After graduation in 1987 Ashley worked as a dietitian in the NHS before moving to Newcastle University as a Research Associate to work on the Northumberland cross sectional cohort studies with Prof Andrew Rugg-Gunn. She was awarded her PhD (a study of the changes in the diets of adolescents 1980-1990) from Faculty of Medicine Newcastle University in 1993. In 1992, Ashley moved back into clinical practice and worked in a number of community dietetic posts and in primary care in London. She returned to Newcastle University in 1995 to take up a post as Lecturer in the newly created Human Nutrition Research Centre to develop a research programme in Public Health Nutrition.

Job Titles:

• Director for Knowledge & Intelligence
• Health Economist

Professor Brian Ferguson is the Director for Knowledge & Intelligence (Northern and Yorkshire) at Public Health England, having previously been Director of the Yorkshire & Humber Public Health and Quality Observatories since 2004, and Co-Director of the Northern and Yorkshire Cancer Registry & Information Service since April 2010. Brian was Chair of the UK & Ireland Association of PHOs from April 2006 to March 2011. Brian is a health economist by background, previously holding posts as Deputy Director of the Centre for Health Economics, University of York, and Professor of Health Economics in the University of Leeds. He was a member of the National Public Health Career Scientist Award Panel for five years and was a PCT non-executive director for four years. Brian was a member of NICE's Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee from 2005-08, and is a member of the Programme Advisory Board of the NIHR Public Health Research Programme. He is a member of the International Editorial Board for the journal Public Health. Brian was admitted to the UK Public Health Register in February 2007.

Job Titles:

• Director
• Professor of Public Health

Professor Catherine Law is Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology and Director of the Centre for Policy Research

Job Titles:

• Assistant Director / National Children 's Bureau
• Assistant Director of the National Children 's Bureau
• Member of the PHRC Project Management Group, 2005 - 2011

Catherine Shaw has been Assistant Director of the National Children's Bureau (NCB) since 2005, having joined NCB in 2001 as Principal Research Officer. Prior to joining NCB, she was a Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute and later at the Policy Research Bureau. Catherine holds an MSc in Advanced Social and Educational Research Methods, a PGCE, and a BA in Social Anthropology. Catherine's areas of interest and expertise include evaluation, supporting practitioners in self-evaluation and participatory approaches to research and evaluation. She has a particular interest in marginalised children and young people including young offenders and those in public care.

Job Titles:

• Head of the World Health Organisation ( WHO ) Collaborating Centre for Policy Research
• Professor

Professor Dame Margaret Whitehead holds the W H Duncan Chair of Public Health, and is Head of the Department of Public Health and Policy in the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society at the University of Liverpool. Margaret is also the Head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Policy Research on the Social Determinants of Health. Researchers involved in this programme are studying both the social causes of ill health and the adverse consequences of having a chronic illness, such as reduced income and employment chances, social isolation and stigma. With international collaborators, they are looking at the ways in which health and social welfare systems themselves reduce or exacerbate the adverse consequences of ill health and what can be done to improve the situation. The centre is developing ways of carrying out health inequalities impact assessment of complex interventions and public policies, including evidence synthesis concerning employment policies. Margaret has worked extensively on social inequalities in health and in health care, in particular the question of what can be done to reduce them. To this end, she has been involved in various national and international efforts, including sitting on the UK Government's Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health (the Acheson Inquiry) and membership of a number of WHO taskforces on equity. Currently, she is a member of two EU networks to learn from international experiences on inequalities: one on finding ways to evaluate the impact on inequalities of complex interventions, and one tracing the health inequalities impact of public policies and political context.

Job Titles:

• Professor of Social Marketing at Stirling University

Gerard Hastings is Professor of Social Marketing at Stirling University , the Open University and L'École des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique, Rennes. His academic career has focused on researching the impact of marketing on society - both for good and ill. To this end he founded and ran the Institute for Social Marketing. This has involved him in advising Government and working with policy makers and civil society nationally and internationally. He has also acted as an expert witness in litigation against the tobacco industry. He was awarded the OBE for services to health care in 2009. In 2014, he was appointed as an expert member on the WHO Ad Hoc Working Group on Science and Evidence for ending childhood obesity and joined the British Medical Association Board of Science. He also accepted the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education on behalf of the University of Stirling for the ground-breaking critical marketing research conducted by the Institute for Social Marketing. In 2015 he was appointed as one of the 23 Commissioners on the Lancet Commission on Obesity

Job Titles:

• Chairman
• Director
• Professor

Professor Hilary Graham joined the University of York in October 2005 as Professor of Health Sciences and as Director of the Public Health Research Consortium. She also holds a Visiting Professorship at UCL Institute of Child Health. Socioeconomic inequalities in health are at the centre of Hilary's research interests and policy commitments. She is particularly concerned with how the experience of inequality across the life course contributes to socioeconomic inequalities in health in adulthood - and with how policies can moderate these inequalities. Linked to this, her work has also focused on how socioeconomic disadvantage shapes women's lives. Here, women smoking has been a major and enduring focus. Hilary has a background in sociology and social policy. Her BA, MA and PhD are in sociology; the research and teaching posts she has held have spanned both disciplines. After working for her PhD at the University of York in the 1970s, she moved to the University of Bradford as a Lecturer in Social Policy. She followed this with a research post in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University, before taking up the post of Head of the Applied Social Studies Department at Coventry Polytechnic (now Coventry University) in the mid 1980s. She was appointed to the Chair of Applied Social Studies at the University of Warwick in 1988, a post she held until 1996, before moving to Lancaster University in 1996 to head up the ESRC's Health Variations Programme (1996-2001). Hilary's recent publications include Unequal Lives: Health and Socioeconomic Inequalities (Open University Press, 2007) and Understanding Health Inequalities (Open University Press, 2009). Hilary has contributed both to research and to policy development in the area of health and inequality. On the research front, she has served on four Research Assessment Exercises. She was a member of the Social Work and the Social Policy Panel of the 1989 Research Selectivity Exercise and of the 1992, 1996 and 2008 Research Assessment Exercises. She is also a member of the NIHR Public Health Programme Research Board. On the policy front, Hilary was a member of the Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health, chaired by Sir Donald Acheson. The Inquiry was established by the Minister for Health in 1997 to review the evidence on class inequalities in health and to make recommendations for policies to address them. My current policy-related commitments include membership of the Department of Health's Scientific Reference group on Health Inequalities, NICE's Topic Selection Public Health Consideration Panel and the Advisory Group for the EU-funded GRADIENT project.

Job Titles:

• International Advisor, Professor

Job Titles:

• Chairman
• Director
• Professor of Public Health Evaluation

Professor Mark Petticrew is Professor of Public Health Evaluation in the Department of Social and Environmental Health Research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is Director of the Public Health Research Consortium (PHRC), and is also involved in the Policy Innovation Research Unit (PIRU), both of which are funded by the Department of Health Policy Research Programme. Mark is editor of the new Cochrane Public Health Review Group, and is closely involved in the Cochrane/Campbell Health Equity Field. He is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne School of Population Health and an Honorary Researcher at the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow. Mark's main research interests are in evidence-based policymaking, systematic reviews, and the evaluation of the health effects of social policies. Current research involves systematic reviews in the areas of tobacco control, housing and regeneration, and employment policy, and primary research on the health impacts of investment in social housing in the UK. He is involved in systematic reviews carried out as part of the Campbell Collaboration and the Cochrane Collaboration.

Job Titles:

• Professor of Health Economics

Professor Mark Sculpher is Professor of Health Economics in the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York, and is Director of the Programme on Economic Evaluation and Health Technology Assessment. He has been based at York University since 1997. Between 1988 and 1997, he worked at the Health Economics Research Group at Brunel University; during 1998 he was a visitor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University in Canada. Mark has worked on economic evaluations of a range of technologies including heart disease and various cancers. He has also contributed to methods in the field, in particular relating to decision analytic modelling and handling uncertainty. Mark was a member of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Technology Appraisal Committee between 2004 and 2008, the NICE Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee between 2006 and 2009 and currently sits on the NICE Diagnostics Advisory Committee. He chaired NICE's 2004 Task Group on methods guidance for economic evaluation and was a member of the Methods Working Party for the 2008 update of this guidance. He was a member of the Commissioning Board for the UK NHS Health Technology Assessment Programme between 2007 and 2010, and currently participates in the UK NIHR/Medical Research Council's Methodology Panel. Mark is a National Institute for Health Research Senior Investigator and is currently President-Elect of the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research.

Job Titles:

• Professor

Professor Martin White is the Programme Lead for Food behaviours and public health interventions, Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR), MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge. Martin was the professor of Public Health at the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University and lead their Public Health Research Programme. As Professor of Public Health, co-director of the public health and applied health interventions research programme and honorary consultant in public health with the North East Strategic Health Authority, he shares responsibility for stategic development and management of academic public health within Newcastle University and North East England. Martin trained in medicine at Birmingham University and, after working in child health for 3 years, moved to north east England to train in public health. He joined Newcastle University as a lecturer in 1990 became senior lecturer in public health in 1992. He was Director of the Health Promotion Research Group from 1996 and became Director of the Public Health Research Group in 2004. He was appointed to the Chair in Public Health in May 2005 and formed the Public Health Research Programme within the newly founded Institute of Health & Society (IHS) at Newcastle University in August 2006. In 2008 he was awarded funding for and became director of Fuse, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health, a UKCRC Public Health Research Centre of Excellence. In May 2011, the Public Health Research Programme was expanded to form the Public Health and Applied Health Interventions Research Programme within IHS. Martin's research focuses on the development and evaluation of public health interventions and understanding and tackling inequalities in health.He has an interest in developing research on the influence of the food industry, the impact of social and policy interventions on diet, and the population impact of individual level interventions. www.cedar.iph.cam.ac.uk/people/leads/martin-white

Job Titles:

• Professor of Health Economics and Director of the Health

Professor Nigel Rice is Professor of Health Economics and Director of the Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) in the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. His research interests focus on the application of quantitative techniques to the analysis of micro-data to inform health and health care policy through robust empirical evidence. Current research activities include investigating the determinants of health, socioeconomic inequality in health and health care, health care system performance, the evaluation of health and health care initiatives, and the allocation of NHS resources. HEDG is currently pursuing a programme of research within these themes funded through an Economic and Social Research Council Large Grant. Nigel serves as a committee member for the Department of Health's technical advisory group (TAG) for resource allocation its analytical sub-group for Payment by Results. He is an editor of the Journal of Health Economics.

Job Titles:

• Director of the Institute of Health

Professor Sally Macintyre is Director of the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow and Honorary Director of the MRC/CSO Social & Public Health Sciences Unit. She has a BA Hons in Social Theory & Administration from Durham University, an MSc in Sociology as Applied to Medicine from Bedford College, University of London, and a PhD from Aberdeen University. After research posts in Aberdeen University and the MRC Medical Sociology Unit, Aberdeen, she became Director of that Unit and oversaw its move to Glasgow in 1984. With the merger of the MRC Medical Sociology Unit and the Public Health Research Unit in 1998, she became Director of the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit. This is funded jointly by the UK Medical Research Council and the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health Directorates. Recently Sally has researched socioeconomic and spatial inequalities in health across time and over the life course, using data from individuals, households and areas to improve understanding of the significance of the social and physical environment for health. Current interests include the potential of area-based health promotion initiatives, the role of neighbourhood barriers and facilitators for health, and developing an evidence-base for health improvement and reducing health inequalities. She is also interested in perceptions of risk, and the understandings and use of public health research by the public, policymakers, practitioners, and the press. Sally is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She has an Honorary DSc from the University of Aberdeen. She was awarded an OBE for services to Medical Sociology in 1998, a CBE for services to Social Science in 2006, and a DBE for services to Science in 2011. From 1995 - 2004 she was Editor-in-Chief of Social Science & Medicine. She was Chair of the Society for Social Medicine in 2005, and in 2006 - 2007 was a member of the Nuffield Council of Bioethics Working Party on Public Health Ethics. Currently she is a member of MRC Council.

Job Titles:

• Professor of Health Policy Research

Professor Stephen Platt is Professor of Health Policy Research in the Centre for Population Health Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. For over 30 years he has maintained a research interest in epidemiological, social and cultural aspects of suicidal behaviour, and has been particularly concerned with the influence of labour market conditions (and related inequalities) on the incidence of suicide and deliberate self-harm. More recently, his research interests have expanded to include: the effect of adverse housing and living conditions on physical and psychological health; the health impact of organisational change and restructuring; evaluation of complex interventions for health improvement and the reduction of health inequalities; smoking-related inequalities and socio-economic disadvantage; and policy analysis relating to public (mental) health.