Alice Wiseman
Vice President, Association of Directors of Public Health;
Director of Public Health, Gateshead and Newcastle COUNCILS
https://new.newcastle.gov.uk/council-elections/chief-executive-directors/director-public-health
Alice Wiseman is the Director of Public Health in Gateshead and Newcastle, and has recently been appointed as a Professor of Practice with the Population Health Sciences Institute at Newcastle University. She began her career as a teacher in inner-city Newcastle, where she became passionate about inequalities and wanted to do more to change systems. She then took a role as a teenage pregnancy coordinator and was supported by an “amazing” DPH to make public health her career. She worked as a public health consultant in the NHS, moved to local government as a consultant, and became Director of Public Health for Gateshead in 2016.
Alice is passionate about improving health and well-being, with a particular focus on tackling the unfair inequalities faced by some communities. She believes that effective action to address these inequalities requires dedicated effort across the determinants of health, as set out in the first Marmot Review, Fair Society, Healthy Lives (2010).
At the UKPHS conference, we are excited to hear Alice speak about her extensive experience in navigating the challenges involved in public health decision-making in the UK. She will discuss how evidence does, or could, best inform decision-making, and will outline practical strategies for closing the knowledge–action gap in her leadership role.
Clare Bambra
Professor of Public Health, Newcastle University
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/medical-sciences/people/profile/clarebambra.html
Clare Bambra is Professor of Public Health at Newcastle University, as well as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, a Fellow of the UK Faculty of Social Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health, and an NIHR Senior Investigator. She is a founding Co-Director of Health Equity North, a Member of WHO Europe’s Scientific Advisory Group on Health Equity, and a Senior Investigator in CHAIN: The Centre for Global Health Inequalities Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Clare is an interdisciplinary social scientist working at the interface of public health, health politics and policy, health geography, and social epidemiology. Her mixed-methods research focuses on understanding and reducing health inequalities. She has published widely, including several books.
At the UKPHS conference, we are excited to hear Clare speak about her extensive experience in navigating the policy and politics of reducing health inequalities in the UK, as well as practical strategies for closing the knowledge–action gap. She will share research in which she has been involved, and that has been translated into meaningful action.
Nason Maani
Associate Professor in Inequalities and Global Health Policy,
University of Edinburgh
https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/nason-maani
Nason Maani is an Associate Professor in Inequalities and Global Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh’s Global Health Policy Unit, in the School of Social and Political Science, and serves as Deputy Director of the Local Health, Global Profits Research theme in the UKRI Population Health Improvement Network. He is also the editor of the Oxford University Press textbook The Commercial Determinants of Health, and the host of Money Power Health, a podcast series discussing the social and commercial forces that shape health.
Professor Maani’s research focuses on the commercial determinants of health, seeking to describe the mechanisms through which commercial actors affect health inequalities, knowledge, and public discourse. This includes primary research and evidence synthesis on a range of health-harming industries, such as those producing alcohol, sugar-sweetened beverages, firearms, social media platforms, and fossil fuels, as well as policy research on the relationships between underinvestment, commercial influence, and inequity.
At the UKPHS conference, we look forward to Nason’s reflections on how commercial forces shape health and inequality, and to his perspective on how research can be used to challenge these influences and strengthen public health policy.