Dr Delia Boccia
BSc MSc PhD
Assistant Professor
In 1998 Delia received a degree in clinical microbiology followed by a two-year training in field epidemiology as part of the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology training (EPIET, 2002-2004). In 2009 she received a doctoral degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine with a PhD looking at the social epidemiology of Tuberculosis in Zambia. In 2010 she was awarded with the post-doc ESRC-MRC interdisciplinary research fellowship which further consolidated her knowledge and skills in social epidemiology and the study of health inequalities.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
From 2013 to 2018 Delia has been a co-organiser of the Social Epidemiology module. Since then she has been supporting the course as lecturer and for the marking process. Delia is also heavily involved with Distance learning teaching and she is currently a tutor on four teaching modules, including Practical Epidemiology (EPM 103), Statistical Methods in Epidemiology (EPM 202) Tuberculosis (ID502) and Global Epidemiology of Non-communicable Disease (EPM 307).
Research
Delia has 10 years of international experience in the field of social epidemiology of infectious diseases, and TB in particular. Her main area of interest is the social and structural determinants of TB and the design and evaluation of socioeconomic interventions able to tackle these factors. She worked extensively in Zambia, South Africa Sudan and Peru, where she co-designed a complex intervention, using social protection and psychosocial activities, to reduce the burden of TB in a slum of Lima. In 2014 she has been awarded with the Wellcome Trust Society and Ethics Research Fellowship to assess the impact of Bolsa Familia (the Brazilian governmental conditional cash transfer programme) on TB epidemiology in Brazil. In 2015 she started the S-PROTECT modelling consortium, an interdisciplinary team of modellers, social epidemiologists, policy makers and implementers working together for the development of a mathematical modelling strategy for the measurement and understanding of the impact of social protection on health. In 2016 - in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the World Health Organization - she launched the SPARKS (Social Protection Action Research and Knowledge Sharing) Network. This initiative aims to bring together researchers from various disciplines to joint efforts and maximise the design, implementation and evaluation of social protection interventions able to tackle major public health challenges. As part of her work she collaborates with several policy making and implementation institutions, including the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, the World Bank and more recently UNICEF. Since 2019 she is part of the SDGs Health and Wellbeing Consortium hosted by the LSHTM. Aim of this initiative is to identify health priorities of mining communities living in 8 different countries and formulate and implement coherent public health strategies to address these priorities. As part of the consortium, Delia has been leading the quantitive baseline assessment and has led the formulation of interventions strategies in South Africa and Latin America.