Conference 2019 Keynote Speakers

Joining us on Wednesday 15th May is Dr Matt Egan, Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Principal Investigator for the NIHR School for Public Health Research (SPHR). His keynote will focus on guidance to introduce local practitioners to complex systems thinking and how it can inform evaluations of local interventions and activities. He is co-PI on two major evaluations funded by NIHR, one exploring the impact of alcohol licensing in England and Scotland and one exploring the health and health inequality impacts of the Big Local community empowerment initiative in England. Matt was recently lead author of a two-part guide to evaluating public health interventions from a systems perspective.

Also joining us on Wednesday 15th May is Dr. Peter Craig, public health researcher at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit within the University of Glasgow where he leads research evaluating the health impacts of public policies. He will be discussing the development and evaluation of complex interventions within medical research, for which he has authored MRC guidance. He has also written on the use of natural experiments to evaluate population health interventions and NIHR/CIHR guidance on context in the evaluation of population health interventions. He is a member of the Cross-Whitehall Trials Advice Panel and was co-Director and leader of the evaluation workstream for What Works Scotland from 2015 to 2018.

Joining us on Thursday 16th May is Glen Garrod, Immediate Past President, Association of Directors of Social Services who will be presenting on application, impact and context. Glen has worked in or researched the public sector for over 35 years. Glen’s background is in clinical psychology (Leeds), social work (University College North Wales), applied research (Edinburgh) and, being a persistent student, he then went off and obtained an MBA (Sunderland). He joined Lincolnshire County Council in March 2012. His role was expanded to include public health in October 2016 when he became Executive Director of Adult Care and Community Wellbeing. He relinquished his role as the East Midlands Branch Chair for the Association of Directors of Social Services (ADASS) in March 2017, which he held for two years, to become the Vice-President of ADASS. He became the President of ADASS in April 2018.