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Dr Ford Hickson

PhD BSc BA FHEA

Associate Professor
/ Programme Director MSc Public Health

Room
Room 244

LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom

Tel.
+44 (0)20 7927 2791

After graduating BSc Psychology in 1988, Ford worked at Terrence Higgins Trust and Frontliners. He joined Sigma Research in 1990. Sigma Research joined LSHTM in 2011.

Ford has spent the last thirty years researching and describing patterns of sex between men, particularly with reference to HIV/STI transmission. Between 1997 and 2008 he led the design of the National Gay Men’s Sex Survey and was centrally involved in the European MSM Internet Survey in 2010 and 2017.

In 1998 he co-authored England's national HIV prevention strategy for gay and bisexual men (Making It Count) with a group of community health promoters, which was subsequently adopted by the Department of Health. He has sat on several HIV and MSM related committees, including the Office for National Statistics’ Sexual Identity Project Expert Research Group.

Ford's doctoral thesis (Portsmouth University, 2008) was on Authority, HIV and Sex between Men in England. He has co-authored over 60 peer reviewed journal articles, two books, numerous monographs and several book chapters. He also holds a BA in Opera Studies (Rose Bruford College, 2014).

Affiliations

Faculty of Public Health and Policy
Department of Public Health, Environments and Society
Department of Non-communicable Disease Epidemiology

Teaching

Ford is a Programme Director for the MSc Public Health, module organiser for 'Principles of Social Research', a lecturer and seminar leader on 'Alcohol, Tobacco & Other Drugs', and delivers lectures on 'Control of STIs/RTIs', 'Health Promotion Approaches and Methods' and 'Sexual Health'.

Research

Ford is currently engaged in developing the Taiwan-UK Sex, Gender & Sexuality Minority Health Network.

Research Area
Complex interventions
Decision analysis
Health promotion
Public health
Risk
Sexual health
Social and structural determinants of health
Behaviour change
Education
Discipline
Psychology
Social Sciences
Disease and Health Conditions
HIV/AIDS
Sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted infection
Country
United Kingdom
Region
Euro area
European Union

Selected Publications

Behavioural intervention to reduce sexually transmitted infections in people aged 16–24 years in the UK: the safetxt RCT
Free C; Palmer MJ; Potter K; McCarthy OL; Jerome L; Berendes S; Gubijev A; Knight M; Jamal Z; Dhaliwal F
2023
Public health research
Sexual happiness and satisfaction with sexual safety among German trans men who have sex with men: results from EMIS-2017.
Appenroth MN; Koppe U; Hickson F; Schink S; Hahne A; Schmidt AJ; Weatherburn P; Marcus U
2022
Journal of the International AIDS Society
Safetxt: A randomised controlled trial of a behavioural intervention delivered by text messages to reduce sexually transmitted re-infections in people aged 16-24
Free C; Palmer M; McCarthy O; Jerome L; Berendes S; Knight M; Carpenter J; Morris T; Jamal Z; Dhaliwal F
2022
British Medical Journal
Effectiveness of a behavioural intervention delivered by text messages (safetxt) on sexually transmitted reinfections in people aged 16-24 years: randomised controlled trial.
Free C; Palmer MJ; McCarthy OL; Jerome L; Berendes S; Knight M; Carpenter JR; Morris TP; Jamal Z; Dhaliwal F
2022
BMJ
What is the empirical basis for converting banded ordinal data on numbers of sex partners among MSM into a continuous scale level variable? A secondary analysis of 13 surveys across 17 countries.
Mendez-Lopez A; Hickson F; Jansen K; Lachowsky N; Burns F; Folch C; Velter A; Weatherburn P; Marcus U; von Rüden U
2022
BMC Medical Research Methodology
Social and behavioural determinants of syphilis: Modelling based on repeated cross-sectional surveys from 2010 and 2017 among 278,256 men who have sex with men in 31 European countries.
Mendez-Lopez A; Stuckler D; Marcus U; Hickson F; Noori T; Whittaker RN; Jansen K; Diaz A; Henszel L; Velter A
2022
The Lancet regional health. Europe
Transmission dynamics of the 2016-18 outbreak of hepatitis A among men who have sex with men in England and cost-effectiveness analysis of vaccination strategies to prevent future outbreaks.
Zhang X-S; Ong JJ; Macgregor L; Vilaplana TG; Heathcock ST; Mindlin M; Weatherburn P; Hickson F; Edelstein M; Mandal S
2022
The Lancet Regional Health Europe
The cost-effectiveness of case-finding strategies for achieving hepatitis C elimination among men who have sex with men in the UK.
Macgregor L; Ward Z; Martin NK; Nicholls J; Desai M; Hickson F; Weatherburn P; Hickman M; Vickerman P
2021
Journal of viral hepatitis
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