John Powles
Brief biodata
I graduated in Medicine from Sydney University, Australia in 1968. I subsequently spent 4 years in the UK then 16 years at Monash Medical School in Melbourne before coming to Cambridge in 1991.
Current interests
1. Post-graduate education in public health
I am academic director of our MPhil degree in Public Health.
2. Health transitions
I have been especially interested in the causes of the East/West health gap in Europe, includiing its institutional causes.This work has included, most recently, my role as one of the principal investigators in the HEM Project based in Warsaw. I helped draft the final ('Blueprint') report to the EU and helped with the country reports for Bulgaria and Romania.
I have been involved in Bulgaria since the early 1990s and started work there on Diet and Stroke.
3. Public health assessments
I am interested in methods for the assessment of public health problems, including, specifically, the global burden of disease methodology and also, more generally, the principles that should apply in choice of metric for public health assessments. I am lead author for the burden of disease attributable to salt in the current iteration of the global burden of disease study (GBD 2005). Teaching materials for my MPhil module on Public Health Assessment are accessible here.
4. Public health policy
The biggest issue here is the need to avert dangerous climate change. I have worked especially on the need to reduce meat consumption and the likely health co-benefits from doing so. I have also written the chapter on public health policy in high income countries for the Oxford Textbook of Public Health and am assistant editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Public Health.
