My research lies within the disciplines of environmental epidemiology and health geography. My focus is on the concept of the exposome - the totality of ‘environmental’ exposures from cradle to grave. I use a life course of place approach alongside novel methods to address the uncertain geographic context problem. My goal is to understand how we interact with the natural and built environment to inform policy and technological developments to reduce the gap in health between the most and least advantaged in society.
I’m currently working at the Institute of Occupational Medicine (IOM) and the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh. On this site you’ll find a record of my work and current interests, which will be updated monthly. Download my full CV here.
PhD in Environmental Epidemiology, 2015
Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry
MA Geography (Hons.), 2010
University of Edinburgh
There are several projects I am working on in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first involves modeling the risk of infection in workplaces. The second involves modeling the environmental determinants of risk of transmission and death.
This ESRC funded project was aimed at exploring how the ‘Great Recession’ and the subsequent austerity measures affected mental health. The project made use of novel administrative data linkages, in particular NHS prescriptions. The project aimed to understand whether area level changes due to the recession and austerity impacted people’s mental health, in addition to individual factors such as employment status. We also explore the potential for area level measures to ‘buffer’ these effects, by creating resilience to stress.
The DISPLAY study has a multimodal before-and-after design using mixed methods to collect data in four purposively selected communities. This data was used to explore the location and density of tobacco retail outlets around the home, school and route to school in relation to smoking attitudes and behaviour.
This Rshiny web application allows you to map alcohol and tobacco outlet density and related harm for small neighbourhoods across Scotland.
Using a number of secondary data sources, I investigated the spatio-temporal relationship between UVR and 25(OH)D levels, in order to determine the association with asthma and allergic health outcomes.
This study proposes to make novel and unique linkages between the HFEA register and temperature, air pollution and UVR exposure data to examine the association of air pollution and UVR with IVF treatment outcomes.
Using data from Public Health England and the Met office we were exploring the relationship between pathogen counts, seasonality and weather for England and Wales. The results were presented in an Rshiny application.
We are exploring how physical, built and social environments evolve over time and how they impact on inequalities in health-related mobility as people move into older age. We used data from 1,091 people in their 70s, together with temporal, area-level measures of their current, recent and past environment.
Mon, Mar 18, 2019, OPENspace Seminar Series
Thu, Mar 7, 2019, Landscape and Wellbeing MSc
Thu, Jan 17, 2019, Scottish Tobacco-free Alliance (STA) Research Meeting
Wed, Nov 7, 2018, ESRC Festival of Social Science
Wed, Jun 27, 2018, GeoTaster Workshops
Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 26th GIScience Research UK Conference
Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 26th GIScience Research UK Conference
Wed, Mar 21, 2018, Landscape and Wellbeing MSc
Thu, Sep 28, 2017, Population, Health and Place Workshop
Wed, Jul 5, 2017, 17th International Medical Geography Symposium