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Spotlight on Professor Daisy Fancourt
9 December 2024
We chat to Professor Daisy Fancourt following the news that she’s been placed on Clarivate’s “most highly cited list” for the second year in a row.
How long have you been at UCL and what does your role involve?
I first joined UCL as a PhD student back in 2012 but after a post-doc stint at Imperial I couldn’t stay away and came back in 2017, first as a Wellcome Fellow and now as Professor and Head of the Social Biobehavioural Research Group.
What inspires you?
I love the topic that I research – understanding how fundamental social behaviours that we often take for granted - from socialising with our friends to joining community groups, volunteering, engaging with the arts –affect deep-seated aspects of our health. But what most inspires me is the people I am so lucky to work with – both my amazing team and the peers I collaborate with all around the world. It’s such a joy working on projects together.
You’ve recently been placed 7th in the UK in “Best Rising Stars in Science”, having made the list last year at #26. Aside from this, what achievements are you most proud of?
I was privileged during COVID-19 to lead the COVID Social Study, which tracked in real time (for 2 years) how people were affected psychologically and socially by the pandemic. Our data helped decide when to release lockdowns and how to design the vaccine roll-out and the study was used as the basis for similar studies in 37 other countries. More recently, my team has been designated a WHO Collaborating Centre for Arts and Health and this has led us to work really closely with WHO, understanding how arts engagement acts as a health behaviour (just like physical activity and diet). Our work has already led to new international strategies from UNESCO, OECD and the European Commission and catalysed new policies on arts and health in over a dozen countries. We have a new Lancet Commission on Arts and Health being published next year and some really exciting global policy work coming up.
What piece of advice would you give to someone starting their career in Science?
Read VERY widely - textbooks, papers, even popular science books from other fields of science – the seemingly further from your field the better. It is so helpful to see how concepts are framed and understood differently in other fields and is such a good way of thinking up new methodological or theoretical approaches.
Tell us about a project you are working on now which is top of your to-do list?
There are quite a few! We have a lot of trials of social prescribing ongoing at the moment, in primary care, CAMHS and schools in four different countries, which are keeping me and my team busy. But what’s also getting me particularly excited is the molecular epidemiology analyses we’re undertaking to understand how our social and leisure behaviours affect gene expression and protein and metabolite abundance. It’s giving us deep mechanistic insight into how these behaviours affect our health.