Professor Angela Harden

Overview

Angela Harden is a social scientist with over 25 years experience in applied research to promote health and reduce inequalities. She is currently Professor of Health Sciences at City, University of London where she leads several research programmes developing and testing interventions targeting the wider social determinants of health. Her research spans the entire the life course, including the REACH Pregnancy programme which is developing and testing new social models of antenatal care in disadvantaged and ethnically diverse urban contexts, the Well Communities programme which is currently examining how to embed community development approaches in local authorities, and the Connect Hackney Ageing Better programme which is testing a suite of community activities to reduce loneliness and social isolation amongst older people. Angela is also the Academy Director of the NIHR North Thames ARC which develops research capacity for conducting and applying applied health research.

From 2015 to July 2020, Angela was the Director of the Institute for Health and Human Development at the University of East London were she led research, consultancy, and training on community and system wide approaches to improving health, including research which has shaped the national roll-out of social prescribing in the NHS. Angela is also recognised as a world leading expert in evidence synthesis. Prior to joining UEL in 2008, she was an associate director of the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre at UCL Institute of Education. Here she developed ground-breaking methods for including qualitative research alongside trials in systematic reviews.

Angela’s research is interdisciplinary and inter-professional and she works with a wide range of research methods from participatory action research through to randomised controlled trials. Her research has led to direct impact on policy, practice and the public through, for example, underpinning NICE Guidance on community engagement to reduce health inequalities and integration of findings from a young commissioners model into a tool kit published by NHS England (‘How to develop youth forums in the NHS’). She has published extensively and has secured funding from national and international bodies such as NIHR, ESRC, AHRC and EUFP7 as well as local health trusts and charities. She is a co-convener of the international Cochrane Collaboration’s Qualitative and Implementation Methods Group. She was a key investigator and theme lead (child and adolescent health) within the NIHR funded North Thames CLAHRC (2013-2019) and is now the Director of the training academy and key investigator in the Population Health and Social Care theme in the successor to the CLAHRC, the North Thames ARC (2019 to 2024). From 2012 to 2018 she was a member of the NIHR Health Technology Assessment Commissioning Board.

Employment

• Professor of Health Sciences, City, University London, Jul 2020 – present

1^st supervisor

• Elizabeth Walters, Research Student

Publications by category