Biography
Seeromanie Harding is Professor of Social Epidemiology at King’s College London, where she leads the Population Health and Nutrition Research group. Her expertise spans social and ethnic inequalities in health over the life course, international comparative studies, and community-based interventions in low resource settings. She has a keen interest in using community-based participatory methods and systems perspectives to engage with the complex socio-cultural-political contexts that drive health disparities. In collaboration with local colleagues, she currently leads the CONTACT (Congregations Taking Action Against Non-communicable Diseases) study which seeks to integrate places of worship into the primary care pathway in Guyana, Jamaica and Dominica; the HEKIMA study in Kenya which seeks to strengthen the primary care system using health kiosks in community markets for prevention and control of cardiovascular diseases; and a study in Brazil which focuses on co-designing interventions to address the physical and mental health of indigenous adolescents in Brazil. Interdisciplinary perspectives, community engagement and collaborative partnerships with policy actors and practitioners are key anchors for these studies to engage communities in health promotion, research, and policy making. Many of these principles also underpin a UK-based collaborative study with Dr Louise Goff ‘Healthy Eating and Active Lifestyles for Diabetes (HEAL-D) in African and Caribbean communities’.
Before joining King’s College, she led the Medical Research Council funded Ethnicity and Health Research Programme at the University of Glasgow. Whilst there she established the DASH (Determinants of Adolescent, now young Adults, Social well-being and Health) study, a London based longitudinal study of ~6000 ethnically diverse young people. DASH built on her earlier research on social inequalities in health at the Office of National Statistics and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine using national and international longitudinal studies of health and well-being. She was contributing author to the UK Health Inequalities Decennial Supplement which underpinned many strategic reviews in inequalities that followed. The Resilience, Ethnicity, and AdolesCent Mental Health (REACH) and eBrain studies are current collaborative studies that build on the findings of DASH with an in-depth focus on the social an biological determinants of mental health of adolescents. The early-LIfe data cross-LInkage in Research (eLIXIR) study is another live collaborative study that continues her interests how social determinants in early life and postnatally affects disparities in later life. She has an interdisciplinary background, with a PhD in Epidemiology, MSc in Medical Demography and BSc in Social Sciences.