Professor Liz Twigg

It’s inevitable that we will face health issues either directly or indirectly through our loved ones at some point in our lives.  Professor Liz Twigg delivered a fascinating inaugural lecture on 8 June 2016 about how geography can help improve our understanding of health-related behaviours such as smoking and mental illness.

Liz discussed the social inequalities in health and highlighted the difficulties of working with health data. It was intriguing to learn how both she and her team produced local details which enabled the public health workers to see the geography of smoking for the local area for the first time. The team achieved this by using the multi-level synthetic estimation technique which has been subsequently used for producing health information for other health conditions such as coronary heart disease, diabetes and smoking cessation services.

In addition to talking about her current work, which focuses on looking at the geographies of mental health, Liz highlighted some of the qualitative research carried out by other colleagues on youth smoking. As the lecture drew to a close, Liz shared the exciting news that she has written a book about the influence of big tobacco on the industry, and that it is due to be published very shortly.

You can view the full video here:

You can find out more about Professor Liz Twigg, along with all our other professors at the University of Portsmouth here: http://www.port.ac.uk/research/meet-our-professors/