Steve Strong is a member of the PHIRST Management Group and has been a public contributor since retiring 4 years ago. Previously he had a career in Health and Social Care Management and has a special interest in equality, diversity and inclusion in relation to public contribution in research issues.
Claire James is a member of the PHIRST Management Group and serves on several Public Health Research panels, strategy & steering groups. She uses her experience in Public Partnership Involvement to advise public health research strategies and believes effective public health research has a crucial role in improving health and wellbeing and in improving public services.
Margaret Kyle is the administrator at PHIRST Connect.
Jacqui Cannon is a public collaborator with the PHIRST LiLaC team and member of PHIRST LiLaC’s steering group.
She has been involved with The Lewy Body Society, a dementia charity for 10 years, as a volunteer whilst continuing to work as a Senior IT Business Analyst in the financial services sector and the last 6 years on a full-time basis. She is a former carer for her father who lived with Lewy body and her mother who lived with fibrosis of the lungs and other health conditions.
She is chair of Wigan Borough Dementia Friendly Community and is a Greater Manchester Champion for Join Dementia Research, which helps to recruit participants for research studies and drug trials.
Timothy Wilson is a public collaborator with the PHIRST LiLaC team and member of PHIRST LiLaC’s steering group. He is also a public advisor with the Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast. His aim is (i) to provide input for enhancing research in mental health, public health and health and social related issues.; (ii) advocate for social models of health, equity and upstream public health and (iii) tackle the causes of the causes, inequities and poverty and lack of investment in public services particularly around preventative public and social health. He has been involved in all stages of research and undertaken many roles with critical input. He is also experienced in communicating health issues and listening to people in the local community.
For many years Tim worked as a manual and physical therapist and researcher undertaking commissions around public health/mental health. He has also taught in Higher Education on numerous health topics and worked as a public health inspector.
Tim is currently a member of Revision 2012-present (mental health alliance, promoting a social model of mental health). His roles include facilitating a reading and discussion group, writing articles, editor of quarterly ‘revision news’ community networking and public speaking at conferences.
Irum Durrani is the public involvement lead for PHIRST LiLaC with Jennie Popay. She also works part-time with the Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast as a public adviser deputy Co-lead for the Implementation & Capacity Building (IMPACT) theme and recently joined the Clinical Research Network North West Coast (CRN NWC) as a Research Engagement Officer to support the Research Engagement Team in promoting research within wider communities.
Irum is a part of LMOS, a local charity tackling food poverty in Liverpool through feeding the low income groups, asylum seekers and refugees. LMOS is also the sponsor of a refugee family from Egypt through a Community Sponsorship Scheme.
She is keen to support work that influences health both locally and regionally by improving health and reducing health inequalities through co-production of research and implementation. She is keen to give a voice to people from ethnic minorities.
David is Professor of Public Health and Policy at the University of Liverpool, and Professor of Child Public Health at the University of Copenhagen. He works clinically as a Consultant in Public Health at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool. He is a co-Investigator with PHIRST LiLaC.
David co-leads Liverpool’s Health Inequalities Policy Research group (HIPR). HIPR’s research focusses on improving health and reducing inequalities through the study of the determinants of health and wellbeing and the policies that impact them. David recently co-led the N8/NHSA Child of the North initiative, focussed on post-COVID levelling up for child health and wellbeing.
Sarah Rodgers is Professor of Health Informatics at University of Liverpool and co-Investigator with PHIRST LiLaC. Sarah is a health data scientist with methodological expertise in evaluating complex public health interventions and policy changes using large routinely collected administrative datasets. She is particularly interested in working with local governments to harness data collected in sectors not usually thought to impact health, to inform local and national disease prevention strategies to reduce health inequity.
Her research focuses on using safe haven data that have been linked across health, social and environmental domains to explore the impact of exposures such as decent housing conditions, alcohol outlets, pollution, and natural outdoor spaces, on health and wellbeing. Since 2018 Sarah has also led the Care and Health Informatics theme of the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration for the North West Coast and is capacity building lead for LiLaC as part of NIHR School for Public Health Research.
Iain Buchan is Chair in Public Health and Clinical Informatics and Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Liverpool. As a public health physician and data scientist, he recently led world-first evaluation of mass rapid antigen testing, risk-mitigated reopening of mass events for UK COVID-19 responses, and designed the Civic Data Cooperative and Combined Intelligence for Population Health Action. Previously, he founded Manchester’s health informatics research centre and over £150m of research. Qualified in pharmacology, medicine, public health, statistics and informatics, he is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and won the 2022 Faculty of Public Health Alwyn-Smith Prize.
Iain is a co-Investigator with PHIRST LiLaC.
Jennie Popay is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Lancaster University. She is a co-Investigator and with Irum Durrani is PHIRST LiLaC’s co-lead for public involvement. Her research interests include the social determinants of health and health equity; the evaluation of place-based policies/interventions; community empowerment; and the sociology of knowledge. She has been involved in producing three online resources: https://forequity.uk – to support researchers to strengthen the equity focus of their research; https://neighbourhoodresilience.uk to support place-based public health initiatives to deliver co-ordinated action to improve the social determinants of health and wellbeing; and http://piiaf.org.uk to support evaluation of public involvement in research. She is currently Chair of the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast Steering Board and was previously lead for public and partner engagement in the NIHR CLAHRC North West Coast and Lead for Public involvement and engagement in the NIHR School for Public Health Research.
Bruce Hollingsworth is Professor of Health Economics at Lancaster University and lead for the Health Economics at Lancaster. He is a co-Investigator with PHIRST LiLaC. His research is principally in the area of efficiency measurement with respect to the production of health and health care, social determinants of health, and the translation of research into practice. He is Senior Editor of Health Economics, Co-Organiser of the UK Health Economists Study Group, and on The Board of the European Health Economics Association.
