Research Opportunities

Our group works to enable health research in diseases, communities and settings where evidence to enable prevention, treatment and management of devasting burdens to health are woefully lacking. Our research sets out to understand how research methods, processes, skills and implementation could happen better, and be locally-led, in the most underserved regions across the globe. Our approaches are typically participatory, mixed-methods action research. This could be exploring health research study design, or how to work with the community to tackle perceptions about research and how to overcome these.

We work with health research teams and health workers across Africa, Asia and Latin America and work together to look closely at the challenges they are experiencing in the design, set-up, operational delivery and reporting of their research. We seek to work with them to identify better methods and approaches. We work in delivering skills training and capacity development and we also use digital technology and want to use advances in machine learning to drive equity in access to knowledge so that researchers, wherever they are, have access to the same quality and volume of training and resources.

Undertaking a DPhil with us could involve clinical trial design, or the application of AI in healthcare. It could have a social science or health economic component. Our DPhil projects always involve working in partnership with our collaborators in the Global South, and therefore travel and capturing data in those settings would be very likely. All our research is about tackling the inequity about where health research happens, who leads and who benefits from the data.

Adolescence and early adulthood are important developmental periods when young people develop health-related habits that are likely to persist through their adult life. This is also a period when health inequalities emerge, as young people finish their education and enter the labour market, developing their individual socioeconomic position. Improving our understanding of the factors that contribute to the development of diet, related health behaviours, and health inequalities over this life stage will help to identify targets for public health policy and intervention.

We currently know little about the factors which influence changes in health behaviours over the transition from secondary education into further education and employment. This PhD project will focus on this question through analysis of data from the US-based NEXT Generation Health Study and from the UK-based DEBEAT study, applying epidemiological methods to assess changes in health behaviours (diet, physical activity and sleep) through adolescence and early adulthood, analyse dynamic relationships between different behaviours, and investigate how differences in these patterns of development between different groups of the population contribute to health inequalities.