Poster Perspectives

A showcase of Early Career Researchers' insights on
Breaking the Cycle of Intergenerational Adversity - The Role of Public Health

Introduction

Welcome to Cambridge Public Health's poster gallery, featuring a vibrant collection of informative and engaging posters created by early career researchers at the University of Cambridge.

The posters loosely centre around the theme of 'Breaking the Cycle of Intergenerational Adversity - the role of public health'. Originally presented at the Cambridge Public Health Showcase on this topic in November 2023, these posters were part of a competition that attracted almost 50 submissions from across the university.

Amongst the array of strong contributions, Hao Tang's poster examining the impact of social media interventions on eating behaviours in young people was voted winner by conference attendees.

Join us on a visual journey as we share the posters and introduce the researchers behind them.

Click on a thumbnail below to select a poster or keep scrolling down to browse through the posters.

Hao Tang

Hao, a PhD student at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, is dedicated to developing a social media intervention to promote healthy eating among young people, while also avoiding unintended negative consequences such as weight stigma.

Beyond research, with 110,000 followers on Chinese social media, she actively advocates for healthy living, body positivity, and effective weight loss strategies.

Dev Malya Sarkar

Dev is an innovation strategist and bio-designer. Since 2011, he has helped improve meaningful healthcare innovation spanning diverse clinical areas for global corporations, start-ups, innovation labs, think tanks, and venture acceleration groups across India, the UK, and the US. Part of Lucy Cavendish College’s inaugural male cohort, Dev is currently a Cambridge Trust, RADMA-UK, and Trinity-Henry Barlow (hon.) doctoral research scholar at the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM).

Dev's research and practice interests include strategic innovation management, frugal- and open innovation in HealthTech. An RSA Fellow, he was recognised as EICBI’s EuropeIndia40 Leader for his contributions to digital health innovation.

Dev’s ongoing research explores the role of early-stage user involvement in unmet need identification for user-centric health apps. Such an understanding can help firms develop personal health tools that truly appreciate a person’s needs.

Maria Ikonomova

Maria is a third year PhD student in the Centre for Sustainable Development in the Department of Engineering. Her PhD research explores how to manage physical infrastructure systems in cities to protect public health from climate-related hazards.

Maria is working with several UK and international cities as part of her PhD research project including Belfast, Ottawa, and London. The end goal of the research is to inform future policy and best practices on how to develop preventive infrastructure responses to protect public health in a changing climate.

Maria’s PhD research is supervised by Dr Kristen MacAskill (Centre for Sustainable Development) and her research advisor is Professor John Clarkson (Engineering Design Centre and Cambridge Public Health).

Key research publications and highlights: 

Ashna Biju

Ashna is a sixth-year medical student at the University of Cambridge. She is a deaf woman of colour and is a passionate advocate against health inequalities and discrimination. Ashna is interested in global health and menstrual health and she wrote a paper on unsafe period product disposal proposing a three-sphere model to develop long term solutions, which was successfully published in the Lancet. In the future, Ashna hopes to pursue a clinical career in public health or women’s health (or both!) alongside academic research.

Jerry Chen

Jerry Chen is a final year PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr Li Wan at the Department of Land Economy. He has a background in Economics and Public Health, and his doctoral research focuses on quantifying the causality between urban built environment and subjective wellbeing.

Jerry’s recent works focus on causal inference and machine learning; identification of working lifestyles using latent class analysis; conceptualisation of spatio-temporal flexibility to further understanding of the post-pandemic future of work.

Rachel Mumford

Rachel is a Public Health Registrar training in the East of England. The research presented in this poster was conducted as part of her MPhil in Population Health Sciences at the University of Cambridge. She has a particular interest in social determinants of health, health inequalities and how publicly available data can inform public health practice. Prior to training as a public health registrar, she worked in health policy for the Department of Health and Social Care.

Nikolai Kazantsev

Nikolai is passionate about preparing manufacturing systems (such as healthcare, aerospace, food) before the next disruption, such as pandemics, war or climate disaster. These systems will develop, reconfigure and deploy manufacturing capability where and when it is needed and increase societal resilience to “black swans”.

The particular issue of Nikolai’s concern are complex socio-technical issues, such as demand-driven collaborations, data sharing, and stress testing of manufacturing systems in augmented reality (such as metaverse).

Nikolai received his PhD from the Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, after the dissertation ‘Supporting SME collaborations in low-volume high-variability manufacturing’.

Lily Taylor

Lily is currently completing a PhD focused primarily on risk-stratification of bowel cancer screening intervals and thresholds for referral on to further investigations. She is interested in mixed methods and acceptability research.

James Howard Dicks

James is a final year medical student at the University of Cambridge with an interest in public health. He is working with Dr John Ford looking into intervention-generated inequalities in diabetes technologies for children and young people with Type 1 Diabetes.

Recent research has indicated widening inequalities in diabetes outcomes across several domains of disadvantage. Given that continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) has the potential to drastically improve diabetes outcomes, we have conducted a systematic review to determine the extent to which access to CGM may be contributing to these inequalities. 

Luma Bashmi

Luma Bashmi, MA is in her second year of doctoral candidacy in the Department of Psychiatry and Cambridge Public Health at the University of Cambridge. She is focusing on mental health and wellbeing among Syrian refugees in Lebanon by applying the IC-ADAPT framework, and looking more widely at mental health in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region.  

Luma is a lecturer in psychology in Bahrain, Fulbright Scholar, and the co-founder and director of a mental health support non-profit foundation in Lebanon, “Elaa Beirut”. Elaa Beirut was founded in response to the 2020 Beirut port explosion, socioeconomic crisis, and pandemic-related mental health and psychosocial distress. With an international network of 30 mental healthcare providers, the non-profit foundation provided over 200 therapy and training sessions to 44 individuals and NGOs. She was the former Chairperson of the Institutional Review Board and Head of Scientific Research & Development at King Hamad University Hospital (Bahrain).  

Lucy McCann

Lucy is an academic foundation doctor working in health equity with John Ford. They are developing a novel framework for effective equity-focused evidence synthesis to improve on PROGRESS-Plus, a Cochrane developed tool.

William Lan

William is currently undertaking an MPhil at the University of Cambridge's Department of Psychiatry. His research delves into digital mental health assessments, with a specific focus on the deployment of Artemis-A, a pioneering digital mental health screening tool, within UK primary healthcare. The goal is to address the underdiagnosis of mental health issues in adolescents. He is investigating Artemis-A's potential to revolutionise mental health assessments, aiming for a future where early detection and timely intervention become standard practice. 

Tads Ciecierski-Holmes

Tads is a graduate-entry medical student and Economics graduate from the University of Cambridge. His research interests focus on barriers and facilitators to accessing healthcare in low-resource settings globally, and the use of predictive tools to better target interventions that aim to change health-related behaviours.

Tads is currently contributing to the analysis of socioeconomic factors associated with enrolment of low-income households in a social health insurance in India with the Health Economics and Financing group at the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health (HIGH), and conducting a health-economic evaluation of an antenatal couples' counselling intervention in Uganda with a research group led by researchers at the University of Southampton and Mbarara University of Science and technology.

His previous research includes using gym membership datasets and behavioural economic models to investigate factors influencing exercise habits while working with the Camera research group at Caltech,  and investigating the current uses of AI in healthcare in LMICs.

Lihani Du Plessis

Lihani is a second year PhD student working on health systems design. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on how to design medical supply chains to be free from labour exploitation. Her background is in public health, history, and bio-health sciences.

Nicole Thomas

Nicole is a Research Associate on the ComPHAD project. She primarily focuss on acceptability and feasibility when implementing health technologies, interventions and initiatives, using a Critical Realist approach.

She's become increasingly fascinated by how emotional drivers influence behaviour and shape thoughts, beliefs, and opinions which can help determine why some things work and others do not. 

Deborah Critoph

Deborah is a registered general nurse who has specialised in teenage and young adult cancer (TYAC). She has worked alongside Dr Helen Hatcher to develop a TYAC service from a standing start for Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust making it the principal treatment centre for East Anglia.

Following this she moved into clinical education and has been teaching clinical communication skills to undergraduate medical students whilst maintaining clinical work as a late effects nurse specialist.

Deborah is now combining these two areas of specialist interest, clinical communication and TYAC, to research how we can communicate effectively with teenagers and young adults with cancer. She will be researching the perspectives of healthcare professionals, young people and parents to understand the interactional dynamics and to ultimately develop a training intervention to educate healthcare professionals to communicate effectively with TYAC.  

Kathryn Dixon

Kathryn is a GP and NIHR In-Practice Fellow. She works within the PELiCam group at the University of Cambridge with a focus on Gypsy, Traveller and Roma Communities. She is currently working on an interview study with Travellers and healthcare professionals, aiming to identify how to improve primary care led palliative care in these communities. 

Isobel Greenhalgh

Isobel is a third year PhD student working on the PIPKIN project (Perinatal Imaging in Partnership with Families) alongside working in collaboration with the Brazelton Centre. Specifically, she is examining how maternal inflammation, nutrition, and SES can work together and apart to influence early infant neurocognitive trajectories, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy and the neonatal behavioural assessment scale.

Daniela Boraschi

Daniela is a Research Associate at the Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public. She is a sociologist of science (PhD) and information designer (BA and MA).

Daniela’s research explores creative ways to bring scientists and the public together to debate social and ethical issues related to scientific discovery and technological innovation. Currently, she is conducting lab-based ethnographic research to explore the integration of socio-ethical considerations concerning AI into scientific research practices. The preliminary findings from this research were presented in a poster during the CPH ECR conference. 

Efthymia Kostaki

Efthymia is a PhD student in Healthcare Operations Management at the Judge Business School. She is passionate about research that addresses deeply rooted inequalities including but not limited to gender, race, and ethnicity. As part of her first research project, she wants to delienate the role of platforms in the matching of patients with clinical trials.

Her studies are funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and UKRI and is affiliated with Clare Hall college in which she advocates for improved student wellbeing as head of sports.

Hannah Lucey

Dr Hannah Lucey graduated from University College Dublin (UCD) Medicine in 2016 and worked as a junior doctor before starting a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Hannah's PhD focuses on the efforts of homeless women who have lost primary custody to care for their children. Women’s trajectories through homelessness and substance use disorder are often shaped by their mothering relationships and the quality of their opportunities to fulfil their caregiving aspirations. While the removal of child custody can offer a source of motivation, in the absence of appropriate support, it can also contribute to a vicious cycle of guilt, mental ill-health and drug use, with further deleterious effects on mothers’ parenting capacity. 

Using data from 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with women experiencing long-term (at least one year) periods of homelessness in the North Inner City of Dublin, this poster explores the relationship between losing child custody and women’s trajectories through homelessness. Hannah argues that Public Health initiatives tackling long-term homelessness need to recognise and respond to the significance of women’s affective, interpersonal relationships, including those they share with their children. 

 

CPH Early Career Researcher Network

The CPH Early Career Researcher Network comprises more than 200 members from across Cambridge University. The network aims to support and increase the visibility of ECRs involved or interested in public health

The network organises events throughout the year to bring together researchers from different disciplines - creating opportunities for sharing knowledge and ideas, networking and collaborations.

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