SPHR@L Team
Management Team
Mark Petticrew is co-Programme Lead and is a Professor of Public Health Evaluation whose interests are in evidence-based policy-making, systematic reviews, and the evaluation of the health effects of social policies.
Karen Lock is co-Programme Lead, Reader in Public Health and a qualified Public Health Consultant, having previously worked at a local level in Primary Care Trusts. Her main research interest is in evaluating upstream policies and approaches to tackling the social determinants of health.
Matt Egan is an Associate Professor and Management Team member. Attaining an MPhil and PhD in the History of Medicine at the University of Glasgow Matt then joined the MRC Social & Public Health Sciences Unit in 2001, before joining NIHR School for Public Health Research (SPHR) Programme in November 2013. His research interests include evidence for policy and practice; natural experiments; systematic reviews and primary studies of complex public health interventions.
Steve Cummins is a Professor of Population Health and NIHR Senior Fellow. Steve’s background is as a geographer (BSc) with training in epidemiology (MSc) and public health (PhD), joined LSHTM after holding posts at Queen Mary, University of London and the MRC Social & Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow. He joined the NIHR SPHR Programme Management Team in March 2014.
Laura Cornelsen has a MSC degree in Health Economics from University of York and a PhD degree in Economics from Trinity College Dublin. Laura worked at the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) and was awarded a fellowship in Economics of Health, funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) in 2014. Laura joined SPHR@L in July 2018 as a Management Team member in its second five-year phase of funding by NIHR SPHR.
Research Team
Elizabeth McGill is a Research Fellow with expertise is qualitative research and systematic reviews. Her early SPHR@L work sought to understand the attitudes to, and views and understandings of, research and evidence among practitioners and policy-makers in the urban built environment. More recently, Elizabeth’s research has a strong focus on alcohol and systems in public health. Elizabeth has now successfully completed a PhD linked to her alcohol research and she has also coordinated the SPHR@L seminar series.
Jakob Petersen has a PhD in Health Geography from UCL and a background in health research and quantitative analysis covering a variety of areas (epidemiology, infectious disease surveillance, geographical analysis, population studies). Jakob is currently working on the evaluation of a scheme to improve the quality of rental housing. The study is funded through NIHR SPHR and is carried out in collaboration with Hackney Borough of London Local Authority.
Rhiannon Barker has a background in health-related social research, working across the statutory and third sector. Following a spell overseas conducting evaluations of food aid distributions and managing an oral history project across Sahelian Africa, she moved into the research department of the Health Education Authority and from there became a freelance research consultant for a range of suppliers including UNESCO and DH. Rhiannon has a PhD exploring national policy for end of life care and is now working on a school’s project which is part of the broader NIHR SPHR Public Mental Health Programme, examining links between school culture and mental health.
Maureen has a PhD in Public Health and Policy competed at LSHTM and a BA and MA in Sociology from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. She has contributed to a range of qualitative and mixed-methods research projects broadly focused on the health of marginalised populations and is currently working on the NIHR SPHR Public Health Practice Evaluation Scheme (PHPES) Landlord Licensing project as part of the NIHR SPHR programme.
Vanessa Er is a mixed method researcher with expertise in nutrition. She is examining complex systems approach to evaluation of public health interventions and exploring the impact of housing policies on health in times of austerity. Besides having an interest in ethnic minority health and obesity, she is also an advocate of participatory research with experience in conducting public engagement activities.
