Understanding the environmental determinants of health

Project description: It is increasingly becoming recognised that our health is determined by where we live in addition to how we live (i.e. features of our lifestyle) and who we are (i.e. individual characteristics such our genetic susceptibility to disease). Relevant drivers of health associated with place of residence include how far we live from health services, the availability of health promoting assets such as parks and greenspaces, or levels of air and water pollution. There is an increasing interest amongst both researchers and public health practitioners and policymakers in the role of these contextual factors as drivers of health; better understanding of this holds the potential to allow us to either modify the environments or how we use them to achieve improvements in health and wellbeing across the whole population. Depending on the interests of applicants there are various opportunities to undertake either quantitative or qualitative research in this field.

Objectives of PhD: The primary objective of the research will be to gain a better understanding of how the environment influences health or related behaviours. The specific focus of the research will very much depend on both the subject and methodological related interests of applicants. For example, quantitative research might make use of secondary datasets collected locally (such as the SPEEDY cohort study of diet and physical activity behaviours in Norfolk schoolchildren), nationally (such as the Biobank cohort of half a million participants) or data collected in the home countries of overseas applicants. The primary supervisor, Professor Andy Jones, also has experience supervising qualitative work and there are opportunities for qualitative research to better understand how people experience their environment and how this shapes their behaviour and wellbeing. To illustrate these various opportunities, some example papers from PhD students recently supervised by Professor Jones are provided below.