I am a Professor of Epidemiology and honorary consultant in Public Health Medicine. My research uses large health datasets to investigate causes of disease in older age to inform prevention strategies. I am currently supported by a Wellcome Career Development Award focussed on understanding relationships between infections and brain health: https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/people-and-projects/grants-awarded/i… as well as through research grants from Open Philanthropy.
I originally qualified in medicine from Edinburgh University and trained in internal medicine in Edinburgh and London hospitals before specialising in public health. I completed an MSc in epidemiology at LSHTM in 2007. My MRC-funded PhD, awarded by UCL in 2013, investigated the role of influenza as a trigger for acute cardiovascular events. After post-doctoral experience as an NIHR clinical lecturer at the UCL Institute of Health Informatics, I joined LSHTM on a Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellowship in 2016.
Affiliations
Teaching
I am joint Departmental Research Degree Co-ordinator for the NCDE department. I am Deputy Chair of the exam board for the professional certificate in pharmacoepidemiology & pharmacovigilance and course organiser for the short course 'Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses of Health Research'. I also teach on various MSc modules including Extended Epidemiology, Study Design and Advanced Research Methods and supervise MSc summer projects and PhD students.
Research
My research seeks to understand causes of disease in older age with a focus on how infections interact with other health conditions. I lead a programme of research funded by a Wellcome Career Development Award which aims to investigate relationships between infections and key components of brain health (mental health, cognitive health and sensorimotor function) in older age. This uses large, longitudinal datasets from across populations along with robust causal inference methods. Through generating new insights into the infection-brain health relationship across and within different populations, my research aims to inform the design of interventions to improve brain health worldwide.
I am also leading a large collaborative project funded by Open Philanthropy to enhance the UK Biobank dataset with additional infectious disease data to enable research into infections and non-communicable disease links.
My other research interests include social and environmental influences on health, health inequalities, vaccine epidemiology and phenotyping methods.