Helen Ward is Professor of Public Health at Imperial College London and co-leads the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre programme on Social, Genetic and Environmental Determinants of Health. She is also Director of the NIHR Imperial Patient Experience Research Centre and leads the Imperial Global Master of Public Health online degree. She trained in Medicine at the University of Sheffield, has an MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and PhD in public health from City University in London, UK. Her research and public health practice have focussed on the prevention and control of infectious disease, particularly HIV and STI, in the UK, Europe and globally. She is co-lead of the REACT (REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission) programme, one of the largest COVID-19 studies in the world which tracked the prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2virus and antibodies in the population, and continues to follow-up 2.5 million people to assess the health and social impacts of the pandemic. Professor Ward was previously Editor-in-Chief of the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections and has been guest editor on several special collections including for the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the Journal of the International AIDS Society, and Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. She has pioneered inclusive approaches to community and patient involvement and engagement in health research.
