Anna Pearce

Biography

Anna is a Research Fellow in the Measuring and Analysing Socioeconomic Inequalities in Health programme of the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, which she joined in September 2017. She has degrees in Geography & Population Studies (BSc), Demography & Health (MSc) and Child Public Health (PhD). Between 2004 and 2017 she was based at the UCL Institute of Child Health, where she carried out a range of research relating to child health inequalities, primarily using cohort data (e.g. the Millennium Cohort Study, Growing Up in Australia, the Southampton Women’s Survey) and with a focus on informing policy. Over this period Anna collaborated with colleagues from the Public Health Research Consortium, the Department of Health Children's Policy Research Unit, and Professor John Lynch at the University of Adelaide (during an MRC post-doctoral fellowship).

Within the Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Anna is working on a Wellcome Trust University Award project "Improving life chances and reducing child health inequalities: harnessing the potential of existing data". Over the course of five years, she will examine why children from less advantaged backgrounds have worse health than their more advantaged peers, and what might be done to prevent this. We will draw upon linked Scottish administrative data and cohort studies (including Growing Up in Scotland) to examine three questions crucial to the reduction of child health inequalities: What factors lie on the causal pathway between socio-economic circumstances and children’s health and which are most likely to reduce HIs? Can we better predict which population sub-groups are most likely to benefit from additional support? To what extent might early years’ interventions, if rolled out under different scenarios of effectiveness, eligibility and uptake, reduce health inequalities?

Anna is also Honorary Treasurer and committee member for the Society for Social Medicine and an Honorary Lecturer at the UCL Institute of Child Health.