Department of Public Health and Primary Care

Our department comprises over 400 staff and graduate students. This includes more than 25 professors, readers, university lecturers, and other senior academic staff.  

Groups in the Department are underpinned by major programme grants, such as those from the UK Medical Research Council (MRC), the Wellcome Trust, the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Cancer Research UK, the UK National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), the European Union, the US National Institutes of Health, industry, and other sources.

The Department provides internationally-recognised expertise in genetic epidemiology, biomarkers, cohort studies, quantitative methods, public health, primary care, and behavioural sciences.  

Major areas of application include:

• common chronic diseases, for example cardiometabolic diseases, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases
• major behavioural risk factors driving these conditions, for example consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and adverse diets

Our department benefits greatly from the expertise arising from its strategic collaborations with the Genome Campus, Quantitative MRC Units and genomic medicine.

It provides excellent training and educational programmes in biostatistics, epidemiology, public health, and primary care, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, including training of Academic Clinical Fellows.

Find out more about our education, training and research activities on our website.

Our research themes

• Biological Basis of Disease
• Early Detection of Disease, Risk Prediction and Screening
• Behaviour and Health
• Health Services Research
• Global Health

Our department

Find out about our research units and how they're funded:

• Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit (CEU)
• The Primary Care Unit (PCU)
• Centre for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology (CCGE)
• The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute (THIS)