Professor Susie Sykes

I am Professor of Public Health and Health Promotion at London South Bank University and Director of the Health and Wellbeing Research Centre within the College of Health and Life Sciences. My work focuses on addressing health inequalities through research, evaluation, workforce development and collaboration with policy and practice partners.

I am Chief Investigator and Director of PHIRST South Bank, an NIHR-funded interdisciplinary research centre delivering rapid evaluations of public health interventions in partnership with local government and practice organisations across England. Through this work I lead evaluations across a range of public health priorities including violence reduction, mental health, gambling harms, smoking cessation and physical activity.

Alongside my research leadership, I lead PHET@LSBU (Public Health Education and Training), which delivers continuing professional development and workforce development programmes for the public health workforce across multiple English regions. I teach public health, health promotion and research methods at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels and supervise PhD and Professional Doctorate students.

Before joining LSBU , I worked at the University of East London, De Montfort University and across NHS, local authority and voluntary sector public health roles. 

I am Vice Chair of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education Global Working Group on Health Literacy, an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a UK Public Health Register Practitioner Assessor.

My research interests focus on critical health literacy, community-centred public health, intervention evaluation and public health workforce development. Much of my work examines how health literacy can move beyond an individualised focus on information and behaviour change towards questions of agency, participation, equity and the wider social determinants of health.

I am particularly interested in the development of critical health literacy across community, organisational and digital settings. Recent projects have explored eHealth literacy in relation to infertility and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the role of critical health literacy within emerging organisational health literacy frameworks. I collaborate widely with international partners and am Vice Chair of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education Global Working Group on Health Literacy.

A second strand of my work focuses on the rapid evaluation of real-world public health interventions and the co-production of research with local government and community partners. Through PHIRST South Bank, I lead evaluations of interventions addressing issues such as violence reduction, gambling harms, smoking cessation, physical activity and unhealthy commodity advertising, with a focus on generating practice-relevant findings that can inform local and national policy.

Director of Health and Wellbeing Research Centre

Chief Investigator PHIRST South Bank