I lead a research team investigating the drivers of long-run improvements in longevity and, particularly, socioeconomic inequalities in morbidity and mortality trends and projections.

Since 2009, my research at UCL has been supported by Legal and General Assurance Society where I am Principal Scientist (Epidemiology) in the Longevity Science Team. Uniquely within the pensions industry, this is a successful example of an embedded industry/academia collaboration to support independent research which is both scientifically novel and of practical relevance to the industry.

We recently modelled the relative contribution of changes in major population level risk factors versus modern treatments in explaining the {unequal} decline in coronary heart disease mortality between socioeconomic groups.

I am currently the Principal Investigator in a project funded by the UK National Institute for Health Research’s (NIHR) Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC – North Thames) on Socio-economic inequalities in health expectation and survival with multiple morbidities.

The project aims to study the impact of socioeconomic inequalities on the age of onset of chronic disease, and the number, type and duration of time spent with multiple diseases on the observed gradient in life expectancy. As populations age, we need to move beyond the single-disease framework. Results from this project will not only inform patient-centered disease management and healthcare policy; it will also help calibrate longevity risk models in an era of pension’s freedom and an expected shift in the annuity market to older ages.

For multimorbidity analysis, we are using the UK’s, and the world’s, largest linked electronic health records database, the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) with over 3 million GP patient records linked through time to individual consultations, hospital admissions, medications, diagnostic tests and mortality.

Before joining UCL, I was in a senior civil servant at the Office for National Statistics (Deputy Director, Social and Healthcare Analysis); the Chair of Eurostat’s ‘Partnership in Health’ programme; and a Consultant Advisor to the Department of Health’s health survey programme. I began my career as a health analyst at the Department of Primary Care, Imperial College London after completing my PhD in SOAS (University of London).