Dr Mindell is a public health physician with experience in epidemiological research, teaching, general practice, and health promotion.  She leads the UCL team dealing with the Health Survey for England (HSE) and other national diet & nutrition and health examination surveys in the UK.  She is also involved in work across Europe to develop comparable health examination surveys.  A major interest is in policies that affect determinant of health and inequalities. She has published many papers in peer-reviewed journals, particularly on cardiovascular disease and its risk factors; tobacco control; transport and health; health impact assessment (HIA); and reports and briefings aimed at a range of audiences.

She is principal investigator of a large cross-research council grant to develop tools to measure community severance at the individual, street, and area level, working with colleagues in UCL's Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering Faculty and Bartlett Graduate School.  She started the Faculty of Public Health's transport and health network and is vice-chair of the Transport and Health Study Group (THSG), leading the work to revise and update its seminal report Health on the Move.  She is Editor-in-chief of the new Journal of Transport and Health.

Before coming to UCL, she was Deputy Director of the London Health Observatory.She has also worked in the Clinical Trials Unit in Oxford and in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Imperial College London.

She led a two-year cancer prevention programme in Oxford, where she developed extensive expertise in health promotion, particularly tobacco control, in which she has since been involved at a national level, both as a Trustee of ASH, Action on Smoking and Health, and for the Faculty of Public Health, on whose Non-Communicable Disease Advisory Group she sits.