Rate My Professor Anne McMunn

Professor Anne McMunn is a Professor of Social Epidemiology in the UCL Research Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, part of the Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care within the Faculty of Population Health Sciences. She earned her BA and MPH from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and her PhD from University College London in 2004, with a thesis titled 'Social roles and women's health: Need satisfaction or normative satisfaction?' using data from the MRC National Survey of Health and Development 1946 birth cohort. Prior to her academic career, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Yemen from 1991 to 1994 and worked as Research Coordinator at King's College London's Department of Genitourinary Medicine from 1996 to 1997. Joining UCL in 1998 as a Research Fellow, she advanced through positions including Senior Research Fellow, Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Social Science & Population, Reader in Quantitative Social Science & Population Health, and Professor. She headed the Research Department of Epidemiology and Public Health from 2018 to 2023.

Anne McMunn's research employs a life course epidemiological framework to investigate social determinants of health, including workplace wellbeing, quality of working life, family care, and health equity. She is Co-Director of the ESRC-funded Equalise: Centre for Lifecourse Health Equity and a founding member of the ESRC International Centre for Life Course Studies in Society and Health (ICLS) and the ESRC-BBSRC Soc-B Centre for Doctoral Training in Biosocial Research. She co-leads the Faculty of Population Health Sciences' strategy on Health Equity and has contributed to major longitudinal studies, including the establishment of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), serving as UCL lead on the Scottish Health Survey. Her influential publications include 'Loneliness, social isolation, and behavioral and biological health indicators in older adults' (Shankar et al., 2011), cited over 1,500 times; 'Social isolation and loneliness: relationships with cognitive function during 4 years of follow-up in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing' (Shankar et al., 2013), with 882 citations; 'Social isolation and loneliness: Prospective associations with functional status in older adults' (Shankar et al., 2017); and 'Gender differences in unpaid care work and psychological distress in the UK Covid-19 lockdown' (Xue & McMunn, 2021). Her work has significantly advanced understanding of health inequalities across the lifecourse.