Arpana Verma

Clinical Professor, University of Manchester
Prof Arpana Verma is Head of the Division of Population Health, Health Services Research and Primary Care. She is Director of Manchester Urban Collaboration on Health (MUCH) a WHO Collaborating Centre (2015-19) and honorary Consultant in Public Health at PHE. MUCH is based within the Epidemiology and Public Health Group, School of Health Sciences in the Faculty of Biology, Medical and Human Sciences. MUCH performs high quality research, teaching and training, in the field of public health and has established links to local, national and international public health organisations (www.manchester.ac.uk/much). Prof Verma is currently the Programme Director for the Masters in Public Health and MRes in Public Health/Prim online distance learning course, which offers an innovative approach to learning, meeting the training needs for health professionals interested in a career in public health or those seeking new skills in this area (http://www.mhs.manchester.ac.uk/postgraduate/programmes/taughtmasters/ph/mph). Prof Verma was the principle investigator (PI) of the European Urban Health Indicator System project (EURO-URHIS 2) funded by DG Research under the FP7 programme (http://www.urhis.eu/), and is also the founding president of the European Public Health Association section on Urban Health (http://www.eupha.org/urban-public-health).

She is also PI on a number of health service research projects, primarily in hepatitis C and blood borne virus prevention, infection control, immunisation including MMR and HPV vaccine. Many of these projects involve data linkage of health indicators, risk factors and the wider determinants of health to help understand the urban challenges to health both within the UK and globally. The most recent EU grant consists of investigating health ageing in cities.

Prof Verma is also an expert for WHO, which has led to several publications (http://www.who.int/kobe_centre/publications/urban_metrics2011/en/index.html http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/172509/Developing-indicators-for-the-Health-2020-targets-Eng.pdf )

Prof Verma also runs training events for public health professionals including the International Festival of Public Health and the 11th International Conference on Urban Health 2014 (http://www.festivalofpublichealth.co.uk/ http://www.icuh2014.com/).