About Us
These senior researchers will support the research by providing expert input to the various work packages. They will also be involved in the training and capacity strengthening component by delivering short courses and participating in the mentorship programme.
Disclaimer:
This research was funded by the NIHR (NIHR132731) using UK international development funding from the UK Government to support global health research. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the UK government.
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Richard Watt is a Professor and Honorary Consultant in Dental Public Health in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, UCL. He is the Director of the World Health Organisation, Collaborating Centre on Oral Health Inequalities and Public Health and is also Director of Research, Development and Innovation for Central North-West London NHS Foundation Trust. He graduated from University of Edinburgh Dental School in 1984 and then completed a MSc and PhD in Dental Public Health at UCL.
His main research interests focus on social and commercial determinants of oral health inequalities and development and evaluation of community-based health improvement interventions. He provides public health advice on oral health policy to various national and international organisations. He is the founder and co-lead of the International Centre for Oral Health Inequalities Research and Policy. In 2014 he received the International Association of Dental Research (IADR) Distinguished Scientist Award for Behavioural, Epidemiologic and Health Services Research and in 2020 the IADR Distinguished Scientist Award for Global Oral Health Research. In 2016 he gained a Senior Investigator award by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR). In 2019 he led the publication of a Lancet Series on Oral Health and from 2020 has co-led the Lancet Commission on Oral Health.
Richard is currently co-leading the CORE Programme.
Carol Guarnizo-Herreño is a Colombian public health dentist and researcher. Her research interests include the socioeconomic inequalities in oral health and the social determinants of health, the influence of macro-level factors (related to the economic and political context) on population oral health and patterns of inequalities, dental care services and public policies, and the relationships between dental health and certain aspects of quality of life including psychosocial wellbeing, and work and schooling performance.
Currently she works at the National University of Colombia where, in addition to teaching, she is responsible for supervising students on their dissertation projects. Previous to her academic career, Carol worked at the Colombian National Institute of Health and the Secretariat of Health Bogota. Carol holds a BSc in Dentistry and an MSc in Public Health from the National University of Colombia and a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health from UCL (University College London).
Carol is currently co-leading the CORE Programme.
Michelle Stennett is a Clinical Research Fellow working with the NIHR Global Oral Health group at University College London. She is currently supporting the work of the Lancet Commission on Oral Health and is also actively involved in teaching, supporting, and supervising undergraduate and postgraduate students at UCL. She is also a Senior Special Care Dentist and Research Lead for Hertfordshire Special Care Dental Service.
Michelle graduated as a dentist from the University of Bristol. She has worked within several Community Dental Services across England and has extensive experience of providing clinical treatment for adult and paediatric patients with special care needs. She is a Sedation Training Accreditation Committee (STAC) approved clinical supervisor for dental conscious sedation (Royal College of Surgeons England). Michelle completed her Membership of the Faculty of Dental Surgeons examinations at the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh, holds a MSc in Dental Public Health from UCL and a Postgraduate Diploma in Global Health and Development from UCL. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research interests include child and adolescent health (childhood obesity, dental care for children and adolescents with autism and learning disabilities), ethnicity and health, and the oral health of vulnerable and marginalised communities globally.
Michelle is supporting the design and development of CORE Programme research activities.
Louise is a Programme Co-ordinator working with the NIHR Global Oral Health group at University College London (UCL).
Louise graduated with BA Honours in Sociology from Goldsmith’s College, University of London in 1999 and has worked in Teaching and Research Administration as part of the Dental Public Health Group at UCL since 2003. Prior to this Louise worked as a Data Manager in Cancer Clinical Trials at Imperial College London.
Louise has been supporting the CORE project since its initial funding application in 2020.
Chantelle is a Programme Manager working with the NIHR Global Oral Health group at University College London (UCL).
Chantelle graduated with LLB Honours in Law from Coventry University. In 2012, she secured the position of Project Coordinator at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). At LSHTM she managed many multi-million pound public health projects like SHARE a £16 million sanitation and hygiene research project funded by FCDO (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) and MAPSAN a £4.3 million project on sanitation mapping funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Chantelle later obtained a Masters in Development Management and worked her way up to Project Manager where she line managed three Project Coordinators as well as overseeing a portfolio of projects owned by her research group.
Chantelle joined University College London in February 2023 to work as Programme Manager for the CORE programme.
Manu is a Dental Surgeon with more than 15 years of global experience of working in different health systems. He is currently working as Professor of Dental Public Health at Queen Mary University of London and Head of Health Policy at Public Health Foundation of India. He has a PhD in Epidemiology and Population Health from University College London and a Masters in Public Health from the University of Glasgow.
His research focuses on risk factors for Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), especially tobacco cessation. Throughout his career, Professor Mathur has been an advocate for the Universal Health Coverage philosophy and played an active role in ensuring that appropriate quality oral health care is available, affordable, and accessible for all, across different health systems.
Manu is a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Global Oral Health and Incoming President of the Global Oral Health Inequalities Research Network of International Association for Dental Research. He has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in leading international journals, has been the principal investigator on many projects funded by Government of India, WHO, MRC-UK, BMGF, USAID and NIH-USA. His areas of expertise cover epidemiologic methods, operations, health systems and policy research, and health promotion. He has also recently been recognised in the top two per cent of impact-making researchers worldwide in the field of Medicine and Public Health.
Manu is currently supporting the CORE Programme research in India and is co-leading the monitoring and evaluation and training & capacity building components of the programme.
Alastair is a Chartered Ergonomist and Psychologist and Associate Professor in Human Factors at Staffordshire University where he is course lead for the part-time distance learning MSc in Human Factors for Patient Safety.
Before applying HF to health and social care he was the first UK data manager for the CIRAS confidential near miss reporting system in the railways. This was initially a pilot with Scotrail drivers and was subsequently rolled out to around 70,000 staff after the Ladbroke Grove rail crash by the then transport minister, John Prescott. He has also previously worked as a Human Factors researcher and consultant across a range of settings including Defence, Nuclear, and the Police.
Alastair’s books include ‘Beyond Human Error’ (CRC Press) and ‘Safety Management: A Qualitative Systems Approach’ (Taylor and Francis). Alastair’s recent research funders include the Office of the Chief Scientist (Scotland), the Health Foundation, the Dunhill Medical Trust, the Borrow Foundation and the European Commission.
Alastair is a co-chair of the Human Factors Special Interest Group for ASPiH, the Association for Simulated Practice in Healthcare, a founding member of the Resilient Health Care Society, Honorary Senior Lecturer at Glasgow Dental School and Honorary Fellow, Dundee Medical School.
Alastair will support the development of the theory of change and supervise qualitative data collection and analysis for the CORE programme.
Alastair is a Chartered Ergonomist and Psychologist and Associate Professor in Human Factors at Staffordshire University where he is course lead for the part-time distance learning MSc in Human Factors for Patient Safety.
Before applying HF to health and social care he was the first UK data manager for the CIRAS confidential near miss reporting system in the railways. This was initially a pilot with Scotrail drivers and was subsequently rolled out to around 70,000 staff after the Ladbroke Grove rail crash by the then transport minister, John Prescott. He has also previously worked as a Human Factors researcher and consultant across a range of settings including Defence, Nuclear, and the Police.
Alastair’s books include ‘Beyond Human Error’ (CRC Press) and ‘Safety Management: A Qualitative Systems Approach’ (Taylor and Francis). Alastair’s recent research funders include the Office of the Chief Scientist (Scotland), the Health Foundation, the Dunhill Medical Trust, the Borrow Foundation and the European Commission.
Alastair is a co-chair of the Human Factors Special Interest Group for ASPiH, the Association for Simulated Practice in Healthcare, a founding member of the Resilient Health Care Society, Honorary Senior Lecturer at Glasgow Dental School and Honorary Fellow, Dundee Medical School.
Alastair will support the development of the theory of change and supervise qualitative data collection and analysis for the CORE programme.
David Conway – Professor of Dental Public Health in University of Glasgow and Dental Lead in Public Health Scotland.
David is currently the Director of Dental Research, and Lead of the Community Oral Health Group in Glasgow Dental School. He is also the Oral & Dental Clinical Research Specialty Group co-lead for NHS Research Scotland and the Chief Scientist Office.
David’s research interests have global health ambitions, are focused on understanding and tackling oral health inequalities – especially related to head and neck cancer and child oral health. David leads the evaluation of the Childsmile – national child oral health improvement programme for Scotland; and is currently co-leading the monitoring & evaluation and training & capacity building components of the CORE programme.
Paulo Sávio Angeiras de Goes graduated in Dentistry from the Federal University of Pernambuco (1992). He completed a Masters in Dentistry (Pediatric Dentistry) from the University of Pernambuco (1997) and a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health, University of London (2001). He served from 1994 to August 2011 as a gazetted professor at the Dept. of Social Dentistry at the Faculty of Dentistry of the University of Pernambuco (FOP-UPE). Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Dept. of Clinical and Preventive Dentistry at UFPE. He has experience in the field of teaching, research and management. In teaching, he coordinates and teaches undergraduate classes in Dentistry; and in the postgraduate program in Child and Adolescent Health at UFPE. In the area of Research and Postgraduate studies, he is leader of the research group Planning, management and evaluation of health services-GESTBUCAL, which constitutes his main line of research, carrying out scientific initiation, master’s and doctorate orientations regularly. In the management area, he has experience in both academic management, where he held the positions of Coordinator of the Undergraduate Course and Head of the Department of Social Dentistry-FOP-UPE (2004-2005); as well as in the management of the SUS, where he held the position of Municipal Health Secretary in two administrations (1997, 2005-2006) in medium-sized municipalities, as well as holding positions in the area of planning and epidemiology. As a result of this work, he also works as an organizational planning consultant for public bodies (Ministry of Health and City Halls). He served as Director of Teaching Development at UFPE from 2014-2015 and Pro-Rector of Academic Affairs-PROACAD at UFPE (2015-2019) and from 2019 onwards he held the position of Coord. of Research at the Faculty of Medicine of Olinda-FMO and in 2021 he became Academic Director of the Faculty of Medicine of Olinda-FMO.
Professor Goes will lead CORE programme activities in Brazil
Aluísio J D Barros trained as an MD in Brazil (1983), and then did a Masters in Statistics in the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brazil. That was followed by a PhD in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Maternal & Child Epi Unit, completed in 1996. In the same year, Aluísio joined the Department of Social Medicine, Universidade Federal de Pelotas (UFPel), Brazil, where he currently holds the post of Full Professor.
He has a strong interest in methods, teaching the advanced statistics courses for postgraduate students. Currently, his main line of work is health equity, with a focus in global monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals. He is also one of the PIs of the Pelotas birth cohorts, with an interest in mental health and child development. In 2009, Prof. Cesar Victora and Aluísio started the International Center for Equity in Health (ICEH) with the objective of monitoring health inequalities in low and middle-income countries. The Center works in close partnership with the Countdown to 2030, the WHO Global Health Observatory and UNICEF.
Aluisio will lead work package 1.1 (Mapping patterns of socioeconomic inequalities in oral health) of the CORE programme.
Regina Mutave a senior lecturer at the University of Nairobi. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Community and Preventive Dentistry from the University of Nairobi and an MSc in Dental Public Health from the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). She graduated with a Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) degree from the University of Nairobi (1993), a Master of Research Degree in Health Geography from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (2003), and a Post-graduate Diploma in Biomedical Research Methodology of the University of Nairobi (2011). She is a registered specialist in Public Health (Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council). She has extensive knowledge in Community and Preventive Dentistry and was involved in the planning and implementation of the first Kenya National Oral Health Survey in 2015.
Dr. Mutave continues to mentor dental students and young dentists on the importance of preventive approaches to dental diseases. She has published extensively and undertaken research studies on tobacco cessation and other preventive interventions.
Dr Mutave is very passionate about improving oral health literacy and providing solutions to improve oral health especially of marginalised groups. She will be joint lead on WP2 and will lead and support research, training and CEI activities in Kenya.
Dr Mutave will lead CORE programme activities in Kenya.
Mirai Chatterjee is the Director of the Social Security Team at the Self-Employed Women’s Association, (SEWA). She is also Chairperson of the SEWA Cooperative Federation of 110 women’s primary cooperatives. In addition, she is responsible for SEWA’s health care, childcare and insurance programmes. She was Chairperson of the National Insurance VimoSEWA Cooperative Ltd and the Lok Swasthya SEWA Health Cooperative and is actively involved in both as a board member and founder. She joined SEWA in 1984 and was its General Secretary after its Founder, Ela Bhatt.
Mirai serves as Chairperson of the global informal workers and policy-makers network, WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising), and on the Boards of several organizations, including Indian Institute of Public Health at Gandhinagar (IIPH-G) in Gujarat, India and the Schwab Foundation for social entrepreneurship. She was advisor to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector and is in the Advisory Group on Community Action of the National Health Mission. She was also a Commissioner in the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. She was a member of the National Advisory Council (NAC), appointed by the Prime Minister of India in 2010. She was conferred the Global Achievement award by the School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University.
Mirai has a B.A. from Harvard University in History and Science and a master’s from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health, USA.
CEI activities in India will be led by Mirai Chatterjee
Sharon Friel is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, Professor of Health Equity and Director of the Planetary Health Equity Hothouse and Menzies Centre for Health Governance at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University. Her research focuses on the political economy of health, governance and the planetary, social and commercial determinants of health inequities. Her book “Climate Change and the People’s Health” highlights the importance of addressing the global consumptogenic system.
She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia and the Academy of Health and Medical Sciences of Australia and on the Board of Directors of Health Justice Australia and the National Suicide Prevention Office Advisory Board.
Sharon will support the CORE programme research by providing expert input to the various work packages.
Cristin Kearns is an Assistant Professor in Preventive and Restorative Dental Sciences and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
She first saw the devastating effects of sugar as Dental Director of Inner City Health Center, a low-income clinic in Colorado. She is one of the first academics to rigorously study the influence of the sugar industry on health and policy. Her research has been published in high-impact journals including PLOS Medicine, PLOS Biology, JAMA Internal Medicine, Science, and The Lancet. Cristin’ document collection efforts culminated in the launch of the UCSF Food Industry Documents Archive (FIDA), which now contains 400,000 pages of sugar industry-related documents that are digitized and searchable. The FIDA is modelled after the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, which revolutionized the field of tobacco control by making internal documents accessible to scientists, policymakers, advocates, and the public.
Cristin was named one of the 32 Most Influential Dentists in the US by Incisal Edge Magazine in 2019. She received her Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from the University of North Carolina, and Master in Business Administration degree from the University of Colorado, Denver.
Cristin will support the CORE programme research by providing expert input to the various work packages.
Blánaid Daly is Dean of Dental Affairs and Head of School at the School of Dental Science, Trinity College Dublin (TCD), University of Dublin, Ireland. She is Professor of Special Care Dentistry / Consultant at the Dublin Dental University Hospital (DDUH) Ireland. After qualifying as a dentist from TCD she worked in the Irish community dental service followed by the Dublin Dental Hospital. She joined the Dental School at King’s College London (KCL) and studied for a PhD in Dental Public Health (DPH). For the last 30 years she has combined her academic interest in DPH with the clinical specialty of Special Care Dentistry (SCD). SCD concerns the improvement of the oral health of individuals and groups with physical, sensory, intellectual, mental, medical, emotional or social impairment or disability. She returned to TCD in 2016 as Professor (full) of Special Care Dentistry and (2017) Head of the Department of Public & Child Dental Health. In 2020 she was appointed to the Lancet Commission on Global Oral Health Inequalities and was joint winner of the Aubrey Sheiham award for distinguished research in Dental Public Health, from the International Association of Dental Research (IADR). She is a member of the scientific committee of the international Association of Disability and Oral Health (iADH) . Her overarching research interest is the reduction of oral health inequalities for people living with disability and vulnerable groups.
Blánaid will support the CORE programme research by providing expert input to the various work packages.
Marco A Peres is a dentist who graduated from the University of Sao Paulo (USP) Faculty of Dentistry, Brazil with a PhD in Epidemiology from USP and University College London. After almost 20 years at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, in 2012, he was appointed as a Professor in Population Oral Health and Director of the Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health (ARCPOH), School of Dentistry, University of Adelaide, Australia. In 2018 he took a position as a Professor of Dental and Oral Health Research, School of Dentistry and Oral Health, Griffith University, Australia. Currently, he is a Research Director and Senior Principal Investigator at the National Dental Research Institute Singapore and Professor and Director of Academic Clinical Programme Oral Health, Health Services and Systems Research Programme, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. His research areas of interest include the effectiveness of oral health-related policies, health services research, big data linkage, oral health surveillance, fluorides, inequalities in oral health, global oral health, life course epidemiology and the relationship between oral health and general health.
Currently, Marco is the President of the International Association for Dental Research Global Oral Health Inequalities Research Network and a member of the Lancet Commission on Oral Health. Marco has been cited in a paper published in 2016 in Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology (doi: 10.1111/cdoe.12249) as the seventh most productive researcher in Public Health Dentistry in the world in the last half-century. Marco has been cited among the top 2% of scientists in the world (September 2020). He was the recipient of the 2017 International Association for Dental Research (IADR) Distinguished Scientist Award for Global Oral Health Research. Since 2002 Marco has had continuous funding grants from Brazilian, Australian and Singaporean agencies with 15 project grants over this period totalling over AU$ 10 million. Marco has supervised 40 postgraduate students, authored three books, 15 book chapters and more than 250 peer-reviewed papers. His work has received more than 20,000 citations, an H index of 79.
Marco will support the CORE programme research by providing expert input to the various work packages.
Ankur Singh is an Australian Research Council DECRA Senior Research Fellow with joint appointments between Melbourne School of Population and Global Health and Melbourne Dental School. Ankur has research training in social epidemiology and he applies a range of quantitative skills to quantify the impact of policy interventions on health inequalities.
His research contributions are in the area of population oral health, tobacco control and social determinants of health. Ankur is also an Adjunct Fellow at Public Health Foundation of India and collaborates extensively with colleagues locally and internationally. Ankur is an Associate Editor of the Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology journal and holds leadership positions both within the International Association for Dental Research Global Oral Health Inequalities Research Network and IUHPE.
Ankur will support the CORE programme research by providing expert input to the various work packages.
