Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Professor of Child Health Research
- Population, Policy & Practice Dept
- UCL GOS Institute of Child Health
- Faculty of Pop Health Sciences
I am a medical sociologist, and was educated/trained at the Universities of Reading, Aix-Marseille and Sussex and the Social Statistics Research Unit act City University under the leadership of John Fox.
I spent a decade in the third sector leading R&D with the children’s charity Barnardo’s; have spend time seconded to a government department to work on a green paper on the family and spent almost 10 years on the board of NICE. Since October 2019, I have been an elected member of UCL council.
I'm an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education and held an honorary fellowship ar All Souls College Oxford.
Internationally, from 2001-2010, I was on the Health Advisory Council, and then the Science Advisory Council with the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research in Canada.
I have served on a number of funding committees for NIHR and other funders, and am an editor with NIHR Journals Library.


I have research interests in the translation of research evidence into policy and practice across health, education and social care; inequalities in health (and what can be done about them) and the voice of the patient, service user and citizen. I write on the lay expertise of users of services (including child users); the synthesis of different kinds of research evidence, and implementation issues. My work has recently been with young people leaving the care system, in particular young people who arrived as unaccompanied children, and young people with a learning disability. Influenced by family, younger colleagues and Greta Thunberg, my current preoccupation is working with clinical, early career and sustainability colleagues as well as local residents on how each group would prioritise the actions in Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children' Clean Air Hospitals Framework.
The majority of my teaching and learning activities involve working with our doctoral students and postdocs, and helping them prepare grant funding applications. In 2019-20, I am teaching on the public health undergraduate course and the masters in women's health.
1975 | Doctor of Philosophy | University of Sussex | |
1972 | Maitrise | Universite Aix-Marseille III | |
1971 | Bachelor of Arts | University of Reading |