MRC Epidemiology UnitCareer Development Fellow
Physical Activity and Public Health
Left the Unit in 2015
Work and interests
Calum was a Career Development Fellow in the Physical Activity and Public Health programme, who left the Unit in June 2015.
After completing an MSc at Bristol, Calum worked as a research assistant on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), based at Bristol. After few years as a research assistant, Calum undertook a PhD, “The use of accelerometers to assess physical activity and explore potential early life determinants in a large cohort of children”. This work involved repeat measures of accelerometry in the ALSPAC cohort and also calibration studies of the Actigraph accelerometer.
While his previous research focused on physical activity measurement and epidemiology in children and adolescents, Calum’s research at the Unit and CEDAR involved examining the relationships between the built environment and physical activity, active travel and health. Specifically, Calum was working with David Ogilvie and Jenna Panter on a scoping and piloting project (RENEW – http://www.cedar.iph.cam.ac.uk/research/directory/renew/) to identify new neighbourhoods that can act as ‘natural experiments’ to assess potential changes in the relationships between the built environment and active travel, physical activity and health; and to test methods of recruitment and measurement tools among people who move to newly built neighbourhoods.