Professor Antony Morgan

Professor Antony Morgan, an internationally renowned expert in the field of asset based public health, became Dean of GCU London from January 2016. He joined the University in 2012 as Programme Leader for the Public Health Masters Programme.

Working for the last 30 years for a range of public sector organisations at local, regional and national levels, he has developed a track record for leading large multi-disciplinary teams of research and technical staff to deliver evidence based programmes for health and service delivery. Previous to joining GCU he was an Associate Director at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) responsible for the strategic development and delivery of programmes to raise standards and the quality of public health policy, practice and research in English Health and Social Care systems.

Professor Morgan has a strong academic portfolio. He has a wide breadth of research expertise in adolescent health, the theory and methods of public health policy and practice, health inequalities and asset based health and development. He is the co-editor of Health Assets in a Global Context: Theory Methods, Action published by Springer, New York in 2010. He has published in a wide range of peer reviewed journals including Health Promotion International, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Social Science and Medicine and the International Journal of Public Health. He has held honorary research positions with the University of Edinburgh, City University and the University of Hertfordshire and is currently an honorary professor at the Andalusian School of Public Health in Granada, Spain and a research fellow at St Andrews Medical School in Scotland.

He has an extensive global network of colleagues working towards similar population health goals which have been developed through his involvement in numerous international initiatives. Most notably through his work at the World Health Organisation’s European Office for Investment in Health and Development in Venice, Italy, where he led the Assets for Health and Development Programme and his collaboration with the Universidad de Desarrollo, in Chile to lead the Measurement and Evidence Knowledge Network of the Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. He has been a member of the WHO Health Behaviour in School Aged Children (HBSC) study since 1998 and the Principal Investigator for England up until 2014.This international study is an on-going research initiative exploring the social contexts of adolescent health and related behaviour in over 40 European countries and in North America. Professor Morgan is currently a member of the Spanish HBSC team.

Professor Morgan originally trained as an applied chemist and later in information science and epidemiology. A graduate of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden (www.ki.se), his doctoral research was in the field of positive social approaches to adolescent health and wellbeing.

He was awarded the position of Fellow of the UK’s Faculty of Public Health in 2006 in recognition of his services to public health. He is currently Associate Editor for Global Health Promotion (GHP).

Most recently his contributions to research and development agendas in health include: development of the Asset Model that inspired reorientation of policy and practice towards positive approaches to health and wellbeing; leading the ‘return on investment’ initiative at NICE aiming to improve decision making in public sector spending; lead partner at NICE in an MRC funded project to research ways in which ‘text mining and machine learning’ technologies can improve literature searching for systematic reviews.

His current research interests include: asset based life course approaches to health and living; developing a better evidence base for social action to reduce health inequalities; and promoting salutogenic competences for improving life chances of vulnerable young people.