New Appointments at the Centre

Posted by Admin on 13 January 2020

Professor Judith Green, Dr Des Fitzgerald and Dr Martin Moore will be joining the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health in 2020, following a rigorous and robust recruitment campaign in the latter part of last year.

The Centre spent much of 2019 involved in preparing a recruitment campaign to attract staff with interdisciplinary and engaged experience and with a variety of expertise. The campaign attracted nearly two hundred applications across the levels of Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor and Professor, in line with WCCEH’s focus on the humanities and social sciences. The applicant pool was extremely strong, and competition for the three permanent posts was fierce.

Professor Judith Green joins the Centre as Professor of Sociology from King’s College London, where she has been a professor of Sociology of Health since 2016. Her career has seen her work to bridge the gap between medical research and sociological research, and lately she has been focusing on mobility, transport systems & health; questions of how evidence travels from one setting to another; methodological development; and health professions. Her work most recently has focused on how telematics are used to mitigate public health disadvantages of heavy car usage.

Professor Green joins the Centre on March 1st 2020, and has kindly agreed to give the Centre’s annual Public Lecture at our External Advisory Board event in the middle of March. Keep an eye out for more details nearer the time!

Dr Des Fitzgerald, a sociologist of science and medicine, will also join us on 1st March 2020, as Associate Professor of Sociology, having been at Cardiff University since 2015. His work has focused on space, environment and mental health; he won the Philip Leverhulme Prize for sociology in 2017, and the research from this focuses on the use of psychological and neurobiological knowledge in architecture and city planning.. His most recent publication was titled “Mental health, migration and the megacity” and examined ‘results and perspectives from an in-progress international and interdisciplinary collaboration investigating the mental health of rural–urban migrant communities in contemporary megacities’.

Dr Martin Moore will join us in September 2020, ready for the new academic year! Martin will be taking up a permanent post as Lecturer in History, after six years as a Research Fellow here at Exeter. His previous body of work has examined historical constructions of physical, mental and social health, and the way approaches to time, waiting and disease management have influenced approaches to health and disease. His work with the Centre will focus on Commuting Britain, and the connections between travel, health and wellbeing in post-war Britain.

Professor Mark Jackson, the Wellcome Centre’s Director, commented: “I am delighted that we have three new colleagues joining us this year: Professor Judy Green; Associate Professor Des Fitzgerald; and Dr Martin Moore.  Their expertise and experience will substantially expand our cross-disciplinary interests and research capacity in environment and health in particular.”