Research Project 

UCL Balzan International Fellowship Programme

Michael Marmot is Director of the Institute of Health Equity, Director of the International Institute for Society and Health and MRC Research Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London, as well as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Society, Human Development and Health at Harvard University. As initiator of the era of social epidemiology and a pioneer in the development of a wholly new concept of preventive medicine, Professor Marmot is using half of his Balzan Prize for a new programme of international fellowships at University College London’s International Institute for Society and Health. The Institute was founded in 2007 to bring together strong individual research programmes on the determinants of health and well-being in society. Multidisciplinary and international in scope, the Institute is unequalled in offering opportunities for research and interdisciplinary research experience for young scholars. The international fellowships have two key objectives in Michael Marmot’s field of scientific interest: research experience in the social determinants of health and well-being, and the fostering of international net- works of research and policy development. The aim is to develop the next cadre of researchers for the future and to benefit from the clear advantages that international collaboration brings.

Visiting Fellows include: Dr. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan (Public Health Foundation of India) and Dr. Rama Baru (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India), who have published and given papers on the social determinants of health; Dr. Krisztina László (Semmelweis Egyetem, Budapest, Hungary), who has published and given a paper on job insecurity and health in sixteen European countries; Dr. Nelly Salgado (Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica, Cuernavaca, Mexico), who has developed a short course on the Social Determinants of Health (with Tarani Chandola and Roberto De Vogli) for her Institute; and Dr. Alex Gaina (University of Toyama, Japan), who has submitted several papers and given presentations on the social determinants of child obesity and development using data from the Toyama Birth Cohort Study, and published work on maternal employment and child obesity in Japan; Dr. Sergio Luiz Bassanesi (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS, Brazil) who was a coapplicant on a successful application to the Economic and Social Research Council on spatial and social inequalities in health in Brazil and India; Dr. Adrienne Stauder (Semmelweis Egyetem, Budapest, Hungary), whose residency explored opportunities for increased data analysis of extant Central and Eastern European data on inequalities, the potential to develop collaborative database analysis and collaborative data collection, and the opportunities for new research questions on protective factors; Dr. Eleonor Fransson (Högskolan i Jönköping, Sweden), who worked on Whitehall II data, and more specifically, on the relationship between BMI/WHR and inflammatory markers, thereby developing her skills and increasing her international contacts; Ms. Gyöngyvér Salavecz (Semmelweis Egyetem, Budapest, Hungary), who worked on the cross cultural consistency of associations between positive effect and cortisol and heart rate variability, did training, increased collaboration between UCL, Princeton and Semmelweis Egyetem, and published a paper on work stress and poor health in Western European and in post-communist countries; Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman (University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand), who conducted discussions of housing as a neglected but crucial social determinant of healthy ageing and possibilities of housing conditions data collection in the ageing cohort studies at UCL; Dr. Maki Umeda (Department of Mental Health, University of Tokyo, Japan), who examined gender differences in the occupational gradient in mental health outcomes in Japan, and the role of job control and effort-reward imbalance in explaining these gender differences, and took data from the Whitehall II study back to Japan to continue the project’s collaboration and comparative work.

An end date for the project is set for 30 December 2016, with a review to extend it further in early December 2016.

Publications

László KD, Pikhart H, Kopp MS, Bobak M, Pajak A, Malyutina S, Salavecz G, Marmot M. 2010. Job insecurity and health: A study of 16 European countries. Soc Sci Med. 2010 Mar. 70(6): 867-74.
Salavecz G, Chandola T, Pikhart H, Dragano N, Siegrist J, Jockel KH, Erbel R, Malyutina S, Pajak, A, Kubinova R, Marmot M, Bobak M, Kopp M. 2010. Work Stress and Health in Western European and in Post-communist countries: an East- West Comparison Study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. 64:57- 62.
Gaina A, Sekine M, Chandola T, Marmot M, Kagamimori S. 2009. Mother em- ployment status and nutritional patterns in Japanese junior high schoolchildren. International Journal of Obesity. 33(7): 753-7.
Baru RV, Sivaramakrishnan K. 2007. The Commission on Social Determinants of Health: Mainstreaming Social Inequalities in Public Health Education in India. The National Medical Journal of India. 22 (1): 33-4.

Website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/iish/fellowships

Excerpt from the: The Balzan Prizewinners’ Research Projects: An Overview 2016