This year’s Health Studies User Conference took place on Thursday 29 June at University College London (UCL) and was organised collaboratively by the UK Data Service, University College London and the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). The conference provided attendees with a unique opportunity to hear from a number of prestigious experts on the latest development in health data.
The topics under discussion included mental health, nutrition and exercise, children’s mental and physical health and ageing. The Conference was free to attend and the presenters offered an unparalleled level of expertise across their various specialisms. Conference attendees heard updates from the data producers of key UK social surveys (cross-sectional and longitudinal studies) including:
Presenter profiles
Keynote speaker
Dr Tamsin Newlove-Delgado, Senior Clinical Lecturer, University of Exeter and Honorary Consultant in Public Health Medicine with the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities
The keynote speech will be delivered by Dr Tamsin Newlove-Delgado. Dr Newlove-Delgado is a Senior Clinical Lecturer and Honorary Consultant in Public Health with the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Research Collaboration (ChYMe) at the University of Exeter. She is an academic consultant on the NHS England Mental Health of Children and Young People in England survey series and co-leads the academic input to the survey consortium, having been involved with the series since 2017. Influenced by her clinical experience in child and adolescent psychiatry prior to entering public health, Tamsin’s research concentrates on the mental health of children and young people, with a particular interest in the application of epidemiological methods for service planning. She currently holds an NIHR Advanced Fellowship, which studies time trends in child and adolescent mental health and mental health related service contacts (the CHANGES project).
Data updates
Dr Suzanne Hill, Senior Researcher, NatCen
Dr Suzanne Hill is a Senior Researcher in NatCen’s Health and Biomedical Surveys team, working on studies including the National Diet and Nutrition Survey and the Health Survey for England. She has previously worked across health surveys including the Mental Health of Children and Young People and Natsal. Suzanne has extensive knowledge of survey research methodologies and data management, particularly relating to health and biomedical research.
Dhriti Mandalia, Senior Researcher, NatCen
Dhriti Mandalia is a Senior Researcher in NatCen’s Health and Biomedical Surveys team. Dhriti has experience working across a range of large-scale quantitative studies, including the 2017 Mental Health of Children and Young People Survey and the follow up surveys in 2020, 2022 and 2023. She has been involved in all aspects of the project life cycle from questionnaire development through to analysis and report writing.
Doug Warren, Ipsos
Doug is an Associate Director in the Public Affairs team at Ipsos. He directs the Active Lives survey on behalf of Sport England, having worked on the project since 2016. He also works on a number of Ipsos’ other large health studies.
Richard Silverwood, Associate Professor, UCL
Richard Silverwood is Associate Professor of Statistics and Chief Statistician at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies. His applied research is mainly within the context of health, in particular the causes and consequences of non-communicable diseases, often taking a life course perspective. He also has methodological interests, including approaches for handling missing data, the analysis of linked survey and administrative data and making causal inferences from observational data.
Meena Kumari, Deputy Director ISER, University of Essex
Meena Kumari is a professor of biological and social epidemiology at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER). She is a leading expert in biomarkers and genetics, and has worked to apply insights from these areas to better understand ageing, cardiovascular disease, and health inequalities using the Whitehall II cohort study of British civil servants and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Meena is the topic champion for health and biomarker content and research in Understanding Society and leads research on the social-biological interface and genetic epidemiology as an investigator for the study.
Obesity, diet and exercise
Elena Mariani, Principle Data Scientist, Nesta
Elena is a Principal Data Scientist at Nesta, a social innovation charity. She has a background in demography, economics and statistics and in her current role she specialises in using microdata to model the impact of food environment interventions on health outcomes.
Mikaela Bloomberg, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cognitive Ageing Epidemiology, UCL
Mikaela is a Research Fellow in the Department of Behavioural Science and Health at UCL. Her research is focused on sociodemographic and lifestyle determinants of cognitive ageing and dementia.
Geraldine Cuskelly, Lecturer in Nutrition, Technical Uinversity of Shannon, Midlands & Midwest
Dr Geraldine Cuskelly is a lecturer in Nutrition in the Technological University of the Shannon on the Athlone campus in Ireland. Her research interests are in the metabolic syndrome and the effects of diurnal patterns of eating on circadian patterns of blood pressure. She starting using the NDNS to interrogate research questions nearly 10 years ago when she was based on Queen’s University Belfast and continues to use it in her current role.
Maryam Kazemi, UCL
Dr Maryam Kazemi is specialised in community and preventive medicine. Following her curiosity about the impact of physical activity on the population’s well-being, she joined a master’s course in sports and exercise medicine at the University of Nottingham in 2021. Currently, she teaches postgraduate students about the role of physical activity in health and disease.
Health of children and young people
Nadia Chan, University of Sheffield
Nadia Chan is a third year PhD student at the University of Sheffield. Currently she is working on projects examining the role of performance-based measures and informant-rating scales of executive functions in identifying problems in attention deficit/hyperactivity.
Madison Bunker, University of Edinburgh
Maddi Bunker is an Edinburgh University PhD student in Social Policy, where she previously received a MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology and MSc in Social Research. Her focus is on social inequalities, mental health and incorporating children’s perspectives in quantitative research.
Dr Emily Murray, UCL
Dr Murray is a Senior Research Fellow at University College London Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. She considers herself a social epidemiologist, with a focus of examining effects of where people reside across their life course on their health and well-being. She is currently an Understanding Society Research Fellow, as well as leading the quantitative portion of an ESRC-funded mixed-method project; both projects examining the ways in which growing up in a coastal town can impact on young people’s life chances.
Mario Martínez-Jiménez, Imperial College London
Mario is an applied microeconomist with broad research interests in the fields of health economics, labour economics and public economics. Mario is a Research Associate in Economics at Imperial College Business School, in the Department of Economics and Public Policy, and affiliated with the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Innovation.
Ageing
Haomiao Jin, University of Surrey
Haomiao Jin is currently serving as a Lecturer in Health Data Sciences at the University of Surrey. His research focuses on digital survey technology and data science modeling of health survey data. Prior to joining Surrey, Haomiao worked as a Research Scientist at the Center for Economic and Social Research, University of Southern California, where he contributed to the operation and research of several large survey studies like the Longitudinal Aging Study in India and the Understanding America Study.
Anastasia Fadeeva, Research Fellow in Health Sciences, City University of London
Anastasia Fadeeva is a Research Fellow in Health Science for the Violence, Health, and Society (VISION) Consortium and based at City, University of London. She has a background in medicine and public health. Her research has focussed on measuring violence and abuse using health administrative data and surveys. Anastasia is also interested in measuring and preventing violence against older people.
Carmen Brack, University of Aberdeen
Carmen is a PhD student from the University of Aberdeen. Her PhD project is entitled “Proactive Frailty Identification in Primary Care”, the primary aim of which is to determine the best way to identify frail older people living in NHS Highland. She is also currently an Alan Turing Enrichment Scheme Community Award recipient and through this is undertaking a collaboration with the University of Bristol.
Odessa S. Hamilton, Doctoral Researcher, UCL
Odessa Hamilton is a UKRI funded PhD candidate at UCL, supervised by Professor Andrew Steptoe, Professor James Kirkbride, and Professor Karoline Kuchenbaecker. Beyond UCL, she works as a Behavioural Scientist at the London School of Economics, and sits on a University of London Board.
Mental health and wellbeing
Jingmin Zhu, Research Fellow, UCL
Jingmin is a research team member of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). Her work focuses on health economics, mental health and wellbeing, health behavioural science and causal inference.
Lateef Akanni, University of Strathclyde
Lateef Akanni, from the University of Strathclyde, has interests in the economics of public policy and secondary data analysis, health and subjective wellbeing. Here she is presenting findings from the UKRI Covid-19 Social Impacts project using ONS Opinions and Lifestyle Survey data.
Klaudia Rzepnicka, ONS
Klaudia Rzepnicka is a senior metal health researcher at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) who specialises in mental health research using primary care administrative data and Census.
Dorothee Schneider, ONS
Dorothee Schneider is a senior researcher at the ONS and first used Understanding Society data during her PhD on immigrant health at the University of Essex.
Adisetu Joy Malih, University of Essex
Adisetu is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)-sponsored biosocial research PhD student at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex. Her research interest is understanding the biological pathways mediating the associations between social position and mental health.