MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit

Rachel graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2014 with an undergraduate medical degree (MBChB) and an intercalated BSc (Hons) in Psychological Medicine. She worked clinically for two years in a range of specialties including Psychiatry, Oncology and Infectious Diseases, before joining the Public Health Medicine training scheme as a Specialty Registrar for NHS Ayrshire & Arran in 2016. She subsequently obtained a Master of Public Health (MPH) with Distinction from the University of Glasgow, winning several class prizes throughout the year including ‘Best Project’ for her dissertation which considered the impact of the Great Recession and subsequent austerity measures on population mental health. Her clinical public health work to date spans a wide range of topics including public health advocacy, the health needs of the working-age population, public mental health and a national needs assessment of Scottish gender identity services. For the latter she was awarded the Faculty of Public Health’s 2018 Littlejohn Gairdner prize for making an outstanding contribution to public health in Scotland.

Throughout her clinical career Rachel has maintained an active interest in research, with a focus on public mental health, welfare policy and health inequalities. She is now pausing her NHS training to complete her PhD project full time, which will focus on developing a microsimulation model that predicts the likely impact of changes to social security policies on mental health inequalities, and testing this using Universal Basic Income. She is based within the Inequalities and Policy programmes of the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, and is supervised by Dr Vittal Katikireddi, Dr Anna Pearce and Professor Alastair Leyland. Rachel is funded by a Wellcome Trust Fellowship, and is very grateful for their support of her research.

Vittal Katikireddi
Anna Pearce
Alastair Leyland