Date:    23rd March, 2023

Venue: The Governors Centre, Sydney Boys High School, Moore Park

MAP:    Directions

Time:   6pm to 7:30pm

Sir Michael’s major contribution is his professional life-time work in public health. He trained as a doctor in 1968 in Sydney, Australia, where his obsession with ‘not sending people back to the circumstances which made them sick in the first place’ took him to the University of California, Berkeley, to study public health.

His PhD in 1975 discovered the correlation between coronary heart disease and the changes to Japanese people’s lifestyle (stress and diet) since moving to the USA. Dr Marmot then returned to his birthplace, London, and, at University College London (UCL) his 50-year journey linking health inequalities to the circumstances in which we are born, live, grow, work and age (the Social Determinants of Health) continued.

Professor Marmot was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen in 2000 for services to epidemiology and the understanding of health inequalities. His analysis of health inequalities among Whitehall British Civil Servants led to the land-mark discovery of the ‘social gradient’ – those at the top of society are less likely to become ill and die early due to their favourable social determinants of health, with the middle classes fairing less well, and those living in the most deprived conditions living shorter lives than they should, in poorer health.

Sir Michael chaired the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health in 2008, which firmly put health inequalities on the global public health map, heralding ‘social injustice is killing on a grand scale’ and demanded ‘Closing the Gap in a Generation’. The findings of the subsequent review of health inequalities across England, Fair Society, Healthy Lives, commissioned by the then government, chaired by Sir Michael, and published in 2010, became enshrined into British public health policy.

Sir Michael has 20 honorary doctorates from universities and colleges across the world. He has numerous awards for his work in public health from leading organisations, including the Prince Mahidol Award, the Balzan Prize, the British Medical Journal’s ‘Outstanding Contribution to Health’ and he was designated a Global Health Leader by the WHO Director-General. He served as President of the British Medical Association 2010-11 and of the World Medical Association 2015-16. He has chaired several reviews for the World Health Organization, including across the Americas, Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as the global review in 2008.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot, CH, MBBS, MPH, PhD, FRCP, FFPHM, FMedSci, FBA, Director, UCL Institute of Health Equity, can be followed on Twitter. He is the author of  The Health Gap: the challenge of an unequal world (Bloomsbury: 2015) and Status Syndrome: how your place on the social gradient directly affects your health (Bloomsbury: 2004).