Learn more about the people and organisations involved in making this interactive atlas:
SAHSU, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment & Health, Sense About Science
Dr Anna Hansell MB BChir MA MRCP MSc PhD FFPH is the Assistant Director of the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU). She is a fully accredited public health doctor who has been working in environmental epidemiology and with small area data for the past 12 years and a Clinical Senior Lecturer with an honorary consultant position with Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust. As Assistant Director of the SAHSU, Dr Hansell has developed particular research expertise in investigating public health issues relating to environmental exposures; ranging from waste (incinerators and biocomposting) to environmental noise. She has a personal research interest in the environmental determinants of chronic respiratory disease and has conducted research on a number of projects looking at health effects of long-term air pollution exposure in studies both in the UK and internationally. Dr Hansell is a member of the government scientific advisory Committee on Toxicity (COT) of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment, providing specialist epidemiological input.
Clare Pearson is a Research Assistant at the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), part of the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health. She has been involved in project managing both the print and online versions of the atlas and assisted with the homepage content design. She obtained a MSc in Epidemiology from Imperial College in October 2012 and since joining SAHSU, has been working on a range of projects, including data checking, bioaerosols from composting plants and childhood diabetes.
Daniela Fecht is Research Associate at the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), part of the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Imperial College London. Her main research area is environmental epidemiology with particular focus on environmental justice, urban environments and small-scale exposure assessment. She obtained her first degree in biogeography from the Universitaet des Saarlandes in Germany and finished her PhD in environmental epidemiology at Imperial College in May 2011.
Her research examines the effects of social and physical environments on population health and how these vary across different subpopulations. She is particularly interested in the built environment as a determinant of social and environmental health and how urban design and patterns of green space can benefit human health and wellbeing.
As a member of the Environmental Exposure Group within the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Imperial College London, she is also working on the development and application of geographical approaches and methods for exposure assessment and environmental health analysis making use of advanced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) methods.
Federico Fabbri is a Research Assistant at the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), part of the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, specialising in data visualization and spatial analysis using web technologies and open source software. His work ranges from personal exposure assessment through software development for epidemiological analysis to public engagement with scientific research.
Federico was responsible for building the mapping applications of the online atlas.
Dr Lars Järup MSc MD PhD MFPHM FFPH both qualified as a Doctor of Medicine and obtained his PhD in occupational exposure at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm. He joined the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), Department of Epidemiology and Public Health in 1998 as a Senior Clinical Lecturer and Assistant Director and became Emeritus Reader upon his retirement in 2009.
Dr Järup’s early career focused on computer science which he extended into his multidisciplinary approach to epidemiology after a change in career that moved him into the field of medicine. After completing his PhD in occupational exposure to arsenic and cadmium at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, he worked there as Associate Professor in Environmental Medicine until 1998 before taking up a position at Imperial College London. He became an advocate for environmental epidemiology through his belief of the importance of place and space as a determinant of health outcomes. In his position as Assistant Director at SAHSU, he played a key role in directing the UK's response to environment and health issues, and in developing spatial epidemiology approaches such as the Rapid Inquiry Facility and early collaborations with the US Centers for Disease Control (as part of their successful Environmental Public Health Tracking Program).
Dr Järup had a distinguished career, publishing over a hundred papers and book chapters. He is survived by his wife, son and daughter and is remembered with great fondness by his colleagues, not only for his considerable expertise and his contributions to environmental epidemiology, but also for the humanity that he exemplified. This atlas is testament to his work.
For ten years, Linda Beale BSc MSc PhD was Research Fellow in Health and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), part of the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Imperial College London. She also held the position of Scientific Coordinator at SAHSU and has led a number of international projects including EUROHEIS II and the development of the Rapid Inquiry Facility, in collaboration with the US Centers for Disease Control. Dr Beale has published numerous papers and book chapters, presented at national and international conferences and been invited to deliver workshops on spatial analysis and environmental epidemiology for the World Health Organisation, National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control, amongst others. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Public Health and has been Analysis and Geoprocessing Product Specialist at Esri Inc., California since 2011.
Her continued research interests focus on the development of methodologies for spatial analysis, modelling and programming bespoke GIS applications for the analysis of spatio-temporal ph nomena, particularly to explore geographical variation in health outcome and environmental risk for epidemiological study. More widely, Dr Beale’s work focuses on disseminating best practice in spatial analytics to research communities and to those seeking to address spatial problems through the use of GIS-based solutions. She has published and presented widely to international audiences and is a member of several scientific journal editorial boards.
Léa Fortunato is Research Fellow in Health Population in the Environment and Global Health Research Group, part of the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Imperial College London. Her main research area is Bayesian statistics applied to environmental epidemiology, with an emphasis on hierarchical modelling, spatial and spatio-temporal modelling.
Director of SAHSU and the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Chair in Epidemiology and Public Health Medicine, School of Public Health
Professor Paul Elliott MBBS PhD FMedSci is the Director of SAHSU and the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Chair in Epidemiology and Public Health Medicine, School of Public Health. He trained in clinical medicine and epidemiology and was a Wellcome Trust Clinica. He moved to Imperial College in 1995 when he was appointed to the Chair in Epidemiology and Public Health Medicine and Head of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. He also holds a position as Honorary Consultant in Public Health Medicine with the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
His main research interests are: environmental epidemiology and small-area health statistics; genetic and molecular epidemiology, gene–environment interactions, nutritional epidemiology, conduct and design of large-scale, prospective population cohort studies; effects of non-ionising radiation on long-term health; biobank studies.
His major research programmes include:
He is a member of the steering committees of both UK Biobank and the LIFE study.
Rebecca Ghosh is Research Associate in Environmental Epidemiology at the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), part of the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Imperial College London.
Her academic background is in environmental science, having gained a BSc in Environmental Science and Development Studies from the University of Sussex (2004) and a Masters in Public Health (with a focus on the environment and health) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2007). She completed her PhD at the National Heart and Lung Institute, investigating the occupational causes of adult onset asthma in a British cohort in 2012.
Her main research interests are in the health effects of environmental exposures and her current research includes work investigating hospital admissions for carbon monoxide poisoning, the health effects of incinerators and the long-term effects of air pollution.
Peter Hambly loaded, cleaned and geocoded health data for the ATLAS. He is responsible for a secure, high performance 2TB health events database containing England and Wales births, still births and deaths since 1991, Cancer incidence from 1974; Hospital inpatient episodes from 1989, A+E from 2008. He is the SAHSU Information Governance lead and an Oracle database administration specialist with Oracle experience dating back to Oracle 5 in 1990. He is currently leading the Rapid Inquiry Facility (RIF – a software tool for disease mapping and risk analysis) development team in porting the RIF to a web based environment using Postgres as the database.
Helga Laszlo project managed the ATLAS (online and print versions) between October 2012 and April 2013. Previously she was a post-doc at SAHSU between April 2010 and June 2012, principally involved in noise related research projects. She now works as a project manager in the LIFE Study at University College London.
Ellen acted as project manager for the Atlas between January and November of 2012. She left SAHSU to become Project Manager of the HIV Modelling Consortium, also at Imperial College London. Ellen currently works part-time in this position whilst studying for a Master's degree in Reproductive and Sexual Health Research at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Sense about Science is an independent charity that challenges misrepresentation of science and evidence in public life. We advocate openness and honesty about research, and ensure the public interest in sound science and evidence is recognised in public debates and policymaking. We work in partnership with scientific bodies, research publishers, policymakers, the public and the media, to encourage different communities to engage with evidence. We have been working with the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU) on the development of this atlas to help ensure that the Atlas is useful for the public, policymakers and academics. We have run five workshops which brought together a range of specialists including epidemiologists, health geographers, statisticians, other scientists, medical doctors, journalists, science communicators, representatives from government organisations, local government and interested public. The workshops were a chance to test the Atlas material on different people and highlight potential pitfalls with interpretation. Several changes to the Atlas were agreed to improve readability and understanding and to avoid misinterpretation.
