Dr Melanie Morris
BA(Hons) MSc PhD FHEA
Assistant Professor
EPH Taught Programme Director
I graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Psychology and then taught in schools for several years before embarking on an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School. I followed this with a PhD at the School looking at socio-economic differences in women’s use of primary care for fertility problems. Since finishing my PhD, I worked for a year at UCL, in the Health Behaviour Research Centre (now the Research Department of Behavioural Science and Health), on a CRUK-funded project developing materials to raise awareness of gynaecological cancers and encourage early presentation to primary care. I returned to LSHTM in May 2012 to work in the Cancer Survival Group on a study into ethnic and deprivation differences in breast cancer survival, and then leading the Cancer Policy Programme - a small team investigating variations in cancer outcomes in the UK and in comparison with Nordic countries.
Recently, I worked in the Health Services Research and Policy department on the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership, trying to establish which health system factors may explain some of the differences in cancer survival seen between countries with comparable health systems. Subseqently I worked with the National Prostate Cancer Audit.
I am now Taught Programme Director for the Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health, and lead for online training for the NIHR IHCoR-Africa project.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
I am Taught Programme Director for the Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health and a Fellow of AdvanceHE. I was Deputy Exam Board chair for the Distance Learning MSc Epidemiology until January 2022 and before that of the MSc Epidemilogy Exam Board.
Since starting my PhD, I have taught on the Distance Learning MSc Epidemiology, on the Fundamentals of Epidemiology module, spending four years as Module Organiser for the module Writing and Reviewing Scientific Papers. I still teach on Fundamentals of Epidemiology, running live web-based seminars, setting exams and marking assignments. I have also taught on the intensive MSc Epidemiology since 2006 and the MSc Public Health since 2018, co-organising Issues in Public Health until 2021.
I co-supervised a PhD student to completion, jointly with Birkbeck as part of the Bloomsbury Studentship programme, working on decision-making around the receipt of chemotherapy in stage III colon cancer patients.
Research
I am interested in health inequalities and how to reduce them. I have worked mainly in cancer epidemiology and health systems research. Until 2022, I was Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Chronic Conditions, with responsibility for the Epidemiology theme, seminars and the student group.
I have worked in the Health Services Research and Policy department of the Faculty of Public Health and Policy, in the Clinical Effectiveness Unit, joint with the Royal College of Surgeons and in the Non-Communicable Disease Epidemiology Depratment of the Faculty of Epidmiology and Population Health, in the Cancer Survival Group.