The Department, headed by Professor John Danesh since 2001, comprises 330 staff, including 25 professors, several university lecturers and senior researchers personally supported by a range of funders, plus more than 60 graduate students.
The Department is one of Europe’s premier university departments of population health sciences, awarded the highest (5*) possible ratings in the UK RAE during the past fifteen years.
The flagship postgraduate course run within the Department, and one which builds on a nearly 30-year history of offering Masters’ level training, is the MPhil in Population Health Sciences. The course is delivered by the Population Health Sciences Partnership – a collaboration between the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and the MRC Biostatistics Unit - and attracts and teaches a diverse and outstanding group of 70-75 students from the UK and globally each year. In doing so, the course plays a key role in enhancing the academic vitality and visibility of the Cambridge population health sciences ecosystem and attracting potential future research leaders.
Outside these University courses, members of the Department also contribute to postgraduate training for healthcare professionals from a range of disciplines. GPs, GP trainees, foundation year trainees and East of England Deprivation Fellows. This includes delivering palliative care study days for GPs and GP trainees in collaboration with the Royal College of General Practitioners, leading sessions on climate change, medical education and diabetes care to GP trainees, foundation year trainees, teaching fellows and East of England Deprivation Fellows, and, alongside Cambridge Breathlessness Intervention Service colleagues, leading breathlessness management study days that have been externally commissioned by national clinical programmes and increasingly draw an international audience.