Rate My Professor Shona Hilton

Professor Shona Hilton is Professor of Health Policy and Social Innovation in the School of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde. She earned her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2005 on the role of stakeholders and evidence in the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine controversy, a Master of Research in Health Promotion with Distinction from the University of Strathclyde in 2001, and a Bachelor of Health Science (2:1) from the University of Strathclyde in 1994. Prior to her current role, she was Deputy Director of the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow for nine years and holds an Honorary Professorship in the School of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow from January 2025.

Her research addresses health disparities through evidence-based solutions, evidence-informed policymaking, and social innovation, spanning local and global challenges including health inequalities, poverty, commercial determinants of health, antimicrobial resistance, non-communicable diseases, and tobacco and e-cigarette policies. She leads the Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC-Glasgow), a £5.3 million National Institute for Health and Care Research-funded six-year programme embedding research in Glasgow City Council to tackle population health inequalities. She directed the £3.2 million MRC-funded SNAP-AMR project in Tanzania, contributing to the country's National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance (2023-2028), and participates in the British Academy-funded ARRIVe project developing an antimicrobial resistance information toolkit for neonatal wards in Tanzania. Shona Hilton has produced over 140 scientific papers and several book chapters, with recent examples including 'Young people’s smoking and vaping behaviour, and comparative perceptions of appeal, imagery and harm, across different vape devices and a tobacco cigarette: findings from UK cross-sectional surveys in 2020 and 2023' (Frontiers in Public Health, 2025), 'Co-production of a youth advocacy video on the harms of e-cigarette advertising in Scotland' (Health Promotion International, 2025), and a 2023 book chapter on policy networks and commercial determinants of health in The Commercial Determinants of Health. She serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal for Qualitative Methods, BMC Public Health, and PLOS One, is a member of the Scottish Parliament Cross Party Group on Improving Scotland's Health, has supervised 12 PhD students to completion, and has led three five-year MRC-funded research programmes.