Our People

Professor Cicely Marston

Official Fellow

Professor of Public Health

Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences

PhD, MSc London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; BA(Hons), Oxon

I have over 25 years of experience of interdisciplinary research in health, working across sectors to understand complex problems, and developing innovative research methods to inform interventions and improve evaluations. I take a collaborative leadership approach, and my research is underpinned and driven by a commitment to health equity.

Until 2025, I was Professor of Public Health and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where I founded and led the DEPTH research group. Our programme of work spanned more than a decade, and brought together scholarship centered on community participation in health.

I studied Human Sciences BSc at Magdalen College, Oxford, and Medical Demography MSc at LSHTM. I stayed at LSHTM to do an interdisciplinary PhD and then postdoc involving research on young people’s sexual practice, participatory health promotion, and sexuality education. For my PhD fieldwork I lived in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, working with and interviewing members of marginalised communities and studying Mexfam’s internationally-renowned sexuality education programme Gente Joven.

I moved to Imperial College to continue my research and to direct a public health MSc, returning to LSHTM from 2005-2025. Over my career I have led and supervised research in other countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa as well as the UK.