Objective 3
Examining clustering of complex multimorbidity in communities and places.
It is well known that there are stark inequalities in health outcomes across neighbourhoods in the UK, but little is known about how specific combinations of health conditions vary as a result of the characteristics of neighbourhoods, households and individuals. Objective 3 will investigate the complex ways in which an individual's risk of developing combinations of health issues is shaped by their own individual and household circumstances and as a result of the kind of place in which they live. We will link detailed data on people including health outcomes and their social circumstances to separate data on the characteristics of the places that they live in. The data on people will come from the Scottish Longitudinal Survey, which uses census records linked to health data, as well as the Dataloch and SAIL data repositories on use of health services in Lothian and Wales respectively. We will link the data on people to a databank on the characteristics of neighbourhoods across the UK including features such as neighbourhood deprivation, green space, pollution and the nature of local food outlets. We will create new and innovative indicators of neighbourhood characteristics, not captured in official statistics, such as community cohesion using analysis of themes that emerge in news papers and social media data about particular places . The overall aim is to produce detailed findings on the extent to which particular combinations of health conditions are concentrated in specific places and groups of people, and to provide explanations of why this may happen.
Geography
Jamie Pearce is Professor of Health Geography, co-Director of the Centre for Research on Environment Society and Health, and Director of the Scottish Graduate School for Social Science. His research seeks to understand social, political and environmental mechanisms at different geographical scales that drive spatial inequalities in health over the lifecourse. He will contribute expertise in social context and inequalities across the programme, and co-lead the objective 3 work on inequalities, spatial variation and syndemics. Find out more about Jamie at the link below:
Chris Dibben has a personal chair in Geography, and is Director of both the Longitudinal Studies Centre Scotland, and the Administrative Data Liaison Service and Research Centre (responsible for the Scottish Longitudinal Study). He will contribute expertise in social context and inequalities across the programme, and co-lead the objective 3 work on inequalities, spatial variation and syndemics. Find out more about Chris at the links below:
Chunyu will deliver spatial data management and spatial analysis using existing social science methods. Find out more about Chunyu at the link below:
Clinical
Stewart Mercer is Professor of Primary Care and Multimorbidity with extensive mixed methods research experience in multimorbidity, physical-mental health comorbidity and health inequalities. He will contribute clinical and multimorbidity expertise across the programme, and lead the clinical contribution to the objective 3 work examining inequalities, spatial clustering and syndemics. Find out more about Stewart at the link below:
Clare is a General Practitioner and was awarded a Medical Research Council Clinical Research Training Fellowship in 2021. Her PhD involves using data science to better understand the interplay between health geography and multimorbidity. She works clinically as a GP and holds the MRCGP and MRCPCH. Find out more about Clare at the link below:
Social Science
Alan Marshall is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods (Social Policy) specialising in the analysis of longitudinal data to understand how social circumstances and place influence health and other outcomes in later life. He has previously served as director of the Census and Administrative Data Longitudinal Studies Hub and will contribute expertise in social context and inequalities across the programme, and co-lead the objective 3 work on inequalities, spatial variation and syndemics. Find out more about Alan at the link below:
Eleojo is a health geographer concerned with the role of place or location in shaping public health(care) and the inequalities associated with this. To this end, he applies a wide variety of spatial and quantitative research methods. Ele joined AIM-CISC in September 2022 as a PDRA to explicate the influence of place on morbidity clustering using multivariate and machine learning methods. Prior to this, he was a PDRA in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow and a GIS Specialist at Cathie group. Find out more about Eleojo at the link below:
Natural Language Processing
Bea Alex is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and has over 15 years of expertise in text mining and natural language processing with applications in the healthcare sector. She co-leads the Edinburgh Clinical NLP group with Dr. Honghan Wu. She will lead the objective 3 Natural Language Processing (NLP) geoprofiling activity, lead the objective 4 NLP to identify adverse events work in Edinburgh, and support external validation/transferability work with Dr Wu in UCL. Find out more about Bea at the link below:
Clare is a lecturer in Governance, Technology, and Data at the School of Social and Political Science. Her research interests are the neuropolitics of identity, social media, big data, natural language processing, an dtext and data analytics. Find out more about Clare at the link below:
Claire is a member of the Language Technology Group, part of the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Find out more about Claire at the link below:
Richard is a Research Fellow at the Language Technology Group at the University of Edinburgh. Find out more about Richard at the link below:
Andreas's research is on applied machine learning (ML) for natural language processing (NLP). He has extended EdIE-N, a neural network based text mining system for analysing radiologists' brain imaging reports (MRI and CT scans). Find out more about Andreas at the link below: