Staff

Shaw, Sarah

Senior Research Assistant

Shaw, Sarah

Name
Sarah Shaw

Qualifications
BSc

Role
Senior Research Assistant and PhD student

Sarah is a Registered Associated Nutritionist working as a research assistant on the Engaging Adolescent in Changing Behaviour (EACH-B) Study. She is also currently completing her PhD on a part-time basis.

Her role on the EACH-B study uses both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to understand adolescents’ behaviours relating to diet and physical activity. She has also been heavily involved in developing the dietary and physical activity assessment methods that will measure the primary outcomes of the EACH-B intervention study.

Sarah’s PhD project aims to understand the combination of social and physical environmental issues that influence adolescents’ dietary behaviours by combining ecological momentary assessment, GPS mapping and social network analysis. Her project will help to identify contextual barriers to health behaviours, aiding the development and implementation of future behavioural interventions among adolescents.

Sarah originally joined the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit in September 2013 as a research assistant on the Hertfordshire Cohort Study. During her time in this role, she was responsible for the management of the cohort as well as conducting data collections and systematic reviews relating to musculoskeletal health, nutrition and ageing.

Sarah Shaw's Publications

Stevens, Martin

Senior Research Assistant

Stevens, Martin

Name
Mr Martin Stevens
Qualifications
LLB
Role
Senior Research Assistant and PhD Student

Martin studied law at Nottingham Trent University, graduating in 2001 with an LLB. After a career in taxation he joined the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit in September 2015 as a research administrator working primarily on the Unit’s Health and Employment After 50 (HEAF) study.

Facilitated by a grant from the Colt Foundation, Martin commenced work on his PhD project entitled HEAF FIRST in August 2017. Martin’s research project is focused on factors in the workplace that could influence retirement decisions and whether retirement is good or bad for health.

Strömmer, Sofia

Research Fellow

Strömmer, Sofia

Name
Dr Sofia Strömmer
Qualifications
BSc, MSc, MSc, PhD
Role
Research Fellow

Sofia Strommer is interested in understanding human behaviour from a motivational point of view. She completed an undergraduate degree in Psychology and Neuroscience from Keele University in the UK. She has also completed master’s degrees in both Counselling and Clinical Psychology. Her academic work has always explored health behaviour topics such as women’s experiences of food choices and eating behaviours, and determinants of exercise motivation. In 2015, she completed her PhD in Psychology focusing on the nature and role of gains in exercise behaviour. Her work developed the Exercise Motives and Gains Inventory (EMGI), the first measure to assess what people get out of exercising and how well those gains meet the reasons for doing it.

Sofia joined the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit in September 2014 as a research fellow to manage the SPRING trial. She works as a part of the team that continues important and promising research on effective ways of improving outcomes for the next generation by supporting healthier lifestyles in pregnant women. Her main undertakings in addition to managing the trial are conducting qualitative research on pregnant women’s views of intervention studies and health behaviour change. She is also involved in expanding the high impact work the MRC does to include notably overlooked and disadvantaged populations, such as pregnant teenagers. Sofia is particularly interested in identifying effective ways of supporting necessary psychological determinants of behaviour change, such as autonomous motivation, self-efficacy and sense of control, in order to maximise the likelihood of enabling lasting behaviour change.

Sofia Strömmer's Publications

Syddall, Holly

Statistician

Syddall, Holly

Name
Dr Holly Syddall

Qualifications
PhD

Role
Statistician

Holly graduated in Mathematics with Statistics (University of Southampton) in 1996, obtained an MSc in Statistics with Applications in Medicine (University of Southampton) in 1997 and in the same year joined the MRC Environmental Epidemiology Unit as statistician for the Hertfordshire Cohort Study.

In 2013 Holly completed a PhD which described social inequalities in musculoskeletal ageing among community dwelling older people in the UK.

Holly is currently the principal statistician for Prof Avan Aihie Sayer’s research programme which aims to identify lifecourse influences on healthy ageing. Holly is line manager for two junior statisticians and provides mentoring and technical support for other statisticians in the MRC LEU. She currently co-supervises one PhD student and is statistical advisor to many research fellows, research assistants, and students who are working on projects within Prof. Aihie Sayer’s research programme.

Holly’s main research interests include (i) the usefulness of grip strength as a single marker of frailty in older people and the association between levels and loss of grip strength in later life and subsequent morbidity and mortality, (ii) the trajectory of grip strength across the life course, (iii) the operationalisation of consensus definitions of sarcopenia to identify prevalence of sarcopenia among community dwelling older adults and (iv) linkage of the Hertfordshire Cohort Study database with routinely collected Hospital Episode Statistics data and the application of appropriate complex survival analysis techniques to analyse the resulting multiple-failure survival dataset.

Holly Syddall's Publications

Titcombe, Philip

Statistician

Titcombe, Philip

Name
Mr Philip Titcombe

Qualifications

Role
Statistician/Statistical Geneticist

Having completed a BSc in Mathematics at the University of Southampton in 2012, Philip continued his studies at the University for a further year and obtained an MSc in Statistics with Applications in Medicine. He joined the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit in October 2013 as a statistical geneticist and provides statistical/epidemiological support to the Unit’s studies.

His work so far has mainly been in the analysis of genetic and epigenetic data within the Southampton Women’s Survey.

Philip Titcombe's Publications

Vogel, Christina

Senior Research Fellow

Vogel, Christina

Name
Dr Christina Vogel

Qualifications
BSc (Hons), PhD

Role
Senior Research Fellow

Christina Vogel (nee Black) has had a long term interest in understanding what is it that makes people choose to eat the foods they do and, accordingly, completed undergraduate training in Nutrition and Dietetics and in Psychology at the Newcastle University, Australia. Christina has worked in public health nutrition for ten years in Australia and Europe. Her work has involved designing and delivering programs in remote indigenous and urban communities, conducting public health observational and intervention research, and developing public health policy. She completed a postgraduate diploma in Politics and Policy at Deakin University, Australia to fuel her interest in public policy development.

Christina has worked at the Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton, UK since 2009. She is part of the team that designed, implemented and evaluated the ‘Healthy Conversations Skills’ workforce development intervention and has developed a programme of observational research to enhance understanding of how the local food environment affects the dietary behaviours of mothers with young children.

Supported by an NIHR Doctoral Research Fellowship, Christina completed her PhD in 2014. Her research is the first in the UK to examine the psychosocial and educational pathways between the local food environment and dietary behaviours. She has developed a number of novel environmental metrics to describe place-health relations that provide alternatives for categorising the food environment. Her work in structural equation modelling has been used to identify environmental, social and psychological focal points for an intervention to improve the dietary behaviours of mothers which is in the early stage of development. Christina is particularly interested in identifying effective interventions that will provide mothers, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, with the environments and skills to make more healthy dietary choices for themselves and their families.

Christina Vogel's Publications

Walker-Bone, Karen

Professor

Walker-Bone, Karen

Name
Professor Karen Walker-Bone

Qualifications
BM, FRCP, PhD, Hon FFOM

Role
Professor of Occupational Rheumatology

Karen graduated from Southampton University Medical School in 1991. She trained in rheumatology in the Wessex region and became an accredited Consultant in 2002. Karen took time out of her clinical training between 1999-2002 when she was awarded an Arthritis Research UK Clinical Research Fellowship to study the epidemiology of neck and upper limb disorders among working-aged adults at the MRC Epidemiology Unit under the supervision of Prof Cyrus Cooper and Prof David Coggon. Karen completed her PhD in 2002. Her work received national attention with two Young Investigator Awards, one from the British Society of Rheumatology and one from the National Osteoporosis Society. Together with Prof Keith Palmer, Karen was also a recipient of an international award from the US National Institute for farm safety research in 2004.

Between 2003-13, Karen worked at the Brighton & Sussex Medical School, starting a month before their first ever cohort of medical students. Her role involved clinical rheumatology and curriculum and phase development, validation and leadership. Karen developed and led the fourth year project module (which received commendation from the GMC) from its inception in 2007 until she left in 2013. Whilst in Brighton, Karen developed a specialist rheumatology clinic for HIV-infected patients to assess and manage the joint and bone manifestations of the chronic infection. In total, she saw more than 400 referrals and this clinic sparked a number of epidemiological studies, which showed for example, the risk factors for gout and elective hip surgery among HIV-infected patients. Together with the HIV Consultants in Brighton, a cohort of 400 HIV-infected men was incepted into a longitudinal study of bone health.

In 2013, Karen returned to Southampton to the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit. She has since taken over leadership of the MRC Programme 2: Musculoskeletal Health in the Mid-Life Course and Directorship of the National Centre for Musculoskeletal Health and Work, co-funded by Versus Arthritis and MRC (https://www.mrc.soton.ac.uk/cmhw/). Their overarching aim is to understand the relationships between work and health, minimising harm to musculoskeletal health at work and maximising capacity to work despite musculoskeletal conditions. The work includes observational studies, a large prospective cohort study of older workers throughout the UK (the HEAF study) (https://www.mrc.soton.ac.uk/heaf/), and intervention studies.

Karen’s research supports policy-making and she is a member if the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council and its Research Working Group (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/industrial-injuries-advisory-council) and has an Honorary Fellowship of the Faculty of Occupational Medicine. She is the Royal College of Physicians’ Representative on the Faculty Council.

Karen Walker-Bone's Publications

Ward, Kate

Associate Professor

Ward, Kate

Name
Dr Kate Ward
Qualifications
Role
Associate Professor

Kate joined the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton in January 2016 as an Associate Professor. She has been a researcher in bone physiology for 20 years and has a PhD in Anatomy from The University of Leeds. She is an Honorary Senior Scientist at MRC Human Nutrition Research in Cambridge.

Kate’s research theme is ‘Nutrition and Musculoskeletal Health through the Lifecourse’ and main research interests are musculoskeletal interactions during growth and in ageing in different populations. Her current work aims to understand the definition, using imaging as a biomarker, development and maintenance of, a healthy musculoskeletal phenotype and the impact of nutrition and lifestyle on skeletal health. Kate is Secretary of the Bone Research Society committee, the National Osteoporosis Society Research Grants Committee, Conference Program Committee and Nutrition and Lifestyle Forum, International Society of Clinical Densitometry Paediatric Task Force, and two Editorial boards and initiated and is organiser of the BRS Muscle and Bone Working Group.

Ward et al Life Course Dietary Patterns and Bone Health in Later Life in a British Birth Cohort Study, J Bone Miner Res, Accepted Jan 2016 Endocrinol Metab. 2014 Sep;99(9):3169-76. doi: 10.1210/jc.2014-1150. Epub 2014 Apr 24

Kate Ward's Publications

Westbury, Leo

Medical Statistician

Westbury, Leo

Name
Mr Leo Westbury

Qualifications
BSc, MSc

Role
Research Fellow / Medical Statistician

I have worked as a statistician at the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit since 2013 after studying Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and then an MSc in Statistics at the University of Warwick.

My research focus is on the lifecourse epidemiology of musculoskeletal ageing. My role involves implementing statistical methods to explore determinants and examine health-related consequences of poor or declining musculoskeletal health in older age. In 2017, I started a PhD on this topic using data from participants of the Health, Aging and Body Composition Study. Other research areas include: exploring determinants of bone microarchitecture in the Global Longitudinal Study of Osteoporosis in Women; understanding risk factors for low physical performance, sarcopenia and osteoporosis in the Hertfordshire Cohort Study and the 1946 British Birth Cohort; and implementing complex statistical techniques to analyse change over multiple time-points.

My role also involves teaching within the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine and disseminating research findings at national and international conferences. I have received Young Investigator Awards at the World Congress on Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases.

Leo Westbury's Publications

Zabella, Elena

PhD Student

Zabella, Elena

Name
Elena Zabella

Qualifications
BSc, MSc

Role
PhD Student

Elena studied a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). After a post graduate role in health and safety she was granted a scholarship from the National Institute of Workplace Safety and Hygiene, in Spain. Later, she went on to complete a Master’s degree in Occupational Health at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain).

Elena currently is doing a PhD at the Centre for Musculoskeletal Health and Work under the supervision of Dr Karen Walker-Bone, Dr Clare Harris and Professor Nigel Arden. The PhD aims to assess whether after knee or hip arthroplasty it is possible to return to work to any type of occupation and heavy occupational demands increase the risk of joint failure or other adverse outcomes.