Michael Marmot

Sir Michael Marmot
Born	Michael Gideon Marmot (1945-02-26) 26 February 1945[1]
Institutions	University College London
Alma mater	University of Sydney (MBBS) University of California, Berkeley (PhD)
Thesis	Acculturation and Coronary Heart Disease in Japanese-Americans (1975)
Known for	Health equity Whitehall Studies[2]
Notable awards	Knight Bachelor (2000) FFPH FBA FMedSci FRCP
Spouse	Alexandra Naomi Ferster[1]
Website www.instituteofhealthequity.org/about/michael-marmot

Sir Michael Gideon Marmot, FBA, FMedSci, FRCP (born 26 January 1945)^[1] is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]}

Early life and education

Marmot was born in London, England. He moved to Australia as a young child,^[3] attending Sydney Boys High School (1957-1961)^[11] and graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree from the University of Sydney in 1968. He earned an Master of Public Health in 1972 and a PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley for research into Acculturation and Coronary Heart Disease in Japanese Americans.^[12]

Career

Marmot 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 (now the International Institute for Society and Health)^[13] 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. He was made a founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998. In 2004 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Epidemiology. He was Chair of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health from 2005 to 2008.

Research

Marmot conducted ground-breaking studies of heart 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.^[12] 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.^{[14][15][16][17][18]}

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 by Her Majesty The Queen for services to Epidemiology and understanding health inequalities. Internationally acclaimed, Professor Marmot is a Vice President of the Academia Europaea, a Foreign Associate Member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and the Chair of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health set up by the World Health Organization in 2005. He won the Balzan Prize for Epidemiology in 2004, gave the Harveian Oration in 2006 and won the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research in 2008. ^[19] In 2008 he became Doctor Honoris Causa of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

In The Status Syndrome: How your social standing directly affects 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.

In 2008, Marmot appeared in Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?,^[5] an American documentary series examining the social determinants of health that drew heavily from Marmot's work on the Whitehall Studies.

On 6 November 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that the Secretary of State for Health Alan Johnson had asked Sir Michael Marmot to chair a Review of Health Inequalities in England to inform policy making to address health inequalities from 2010. The Review was announced at the launch of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health report Closing the Gap in a Generation.

The European Office of the WHO is commissioning a European Review on the Social Determinants of Health and the Health Divide. The Review will be conducted by a Consortium of experts/institutions chaired by Professor Sir Michael Marmot.

The purpose of the review will be to identify the relevance of the findings of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England post 2010 (Marmot Review), and other new evidence to the European context and specificity and translate these into policy proposals.

It will feed into the development of a renewed European Regional Health Policy and contribute to specific aspects of the policy especially where it relates to the social determinants of health. Marmot's research has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Medical Research Council (MRC).^[20]

Awards and honours

In 2011, Marmot became Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Peru.^[21][22] In July 2012, Marmot was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Northumbria University in England.^[23]

Personal life

Marmot is married to Alexandra Naomi Ferster, and has two sons and a daughter (Deborah)^[1] and lives in Hampstead, London.

Selected bibliography

Books

• Marmot, Michael; Wilkinson, Richard G. (2003). The solid facts. Copenhagen: World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe. ISBN 9780585492520. 
• Marmot, Michael (2004). The status syndrome: how social standing affects our health and longevity. New York: Times Books. ISBN 9780805073706. 
• Marmot, Michael; Wilkinson, Richard G. (2006) [1999]. Social determinants of health (2nd ed.). Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198565895. 
• Marmot, Michael; Siegrist, Johannes (2006). Social inequalities in health: new evidence and policy implications. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198568162. 

References

Media related to Michael Marmot at Wikimedia Commons