Michael Marmot

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Sir Michael Gideon Marmot (born 26 January 1945) is professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London.

Michael Marmot was born in London, England. He moved to Australia as a young child and graduated in Medicine from the University of Sydney, Australia, in 1968. He earned a MPH in 1972 and PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley. He became Fellow of the (English) Faculty of Public Health Medicine in 1989 and was appointed Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL in 1985. This became a joint Chair, held at UCL and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in 1990. He became Director of the International Centre for Health and Society that he established at UCL in 1994. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and awarded an MRC Professorship in 1995. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1996. Chair of WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2006-

He conducted ground-breaking studies of health disease and stroke, comparing Japanese people in Japan (high stroke rates, low heart attack rates) with those in Hawaii and California, where, especially in later generations, the disease patterns became reversed after adopting lifestyle, stress and diet changes. He has more recently led the Whitehall Studies of British civil servants, again focusing on heart disease and other disease patterns. His department includes the MRC National Survey of Health & Development, a longitudinal study directed by Professor Michael Wadsworth of people born in Britain in 1946 and followed up since. There are 120 other academic staff in the department.

He has worked closely with the Office for National Statistics and its predecessor the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, and especially with Abraham Manie Adelstein and John Fox.

Sir Michael Marmot has a special interest in inequalities in health and their causes and has been a government advisor in seeking to identify ways to mitigate them. He served on the Scientific Advisory Group of the Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health chaired by Sir Donald Acheson, the former UK chief medical officer. This reported in November 1998. In 2000, he was knighted for services to epidemiology and health inequalities.

In Status Syndrome: How your social standing directly effects your health and life expectancy, he argues that socio-economic position is an important determinant for health outcomes. This result holds even if we control for the effects of income, education and risk factors (such as smoking) on health. The causal pathway Marmot identifies concerns the psychic benefits of "being in control" of one's life. Autonomy in this sense is related to our socio-economic position. Based on comparative studies, Marmot argues that we can make our society more participatory and inclusive in order to increase overall public health.

Marmot has two sons and a daughter and lives in Golders Green.