Spotlight on Professor Katie Harron

What is your role and what does it involve?

I lead a group of researchers working on a range of projects within the field of child health, mostly working with administrative (routinely-collected) data. I’m a statistician by background, and became interested early on in how data can be used to support decisions about how best to improve child health, and in how things that happen to us early in life can have lasting repercussions and affect our health and wellbeing throughout our lives. I’m lucky enough to be working in an area that allows me to explore both of these things. I’m also a theme lead (for Health of the Public), for the UCL Birkbeck MRC DTP, alongside Prof Pam Sonnenberg. This means that I get to shortlist and interview new candidates, and mentor these students through their PhD journey (including selecting rotation and PhD projects), to future postdoctoral fellowships and other career opportunities. It’s a real privilege.

How are you improving the health of the public?

I lead the ECHILD database (Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data), which links together health, education and social care data for 20 million children in England. The scale and research opportunities offered by this data resource are huge: it allows us to get a holistic view of children and families’ lives, rather than working within data silos. Child health in the UK has seen a shocking decline over recent years, and if we want to promote lifelong health and wellbeing, we really need to start with the early years. Having data to evidence the most important influences on child health, and the impact of policies and interventions, is key to improving the health of the public in the long term.

What do you find most interesting or enjoyable about your work? 

Working with PhD students and junior researchers. I really enjoy seeing them learn new skills, find their niche, and develop as independent researchers. I learn from early career researchers all the time.

How have cross-disciplinary collaborations shaped your research? 

Working with cross-sectoral data means that I am constantly relying on collaborations. I work in teams with basic scientists, social scientists, epidemiologists, clinicians, health visitors and educational professionals. We can’t all be an expert in everything, so inter-disciplinary research is key to really understanding what we see in the data.

What advice would you offer to others interested in developing cross-disciplinary research?

If you want to work in an area where you have autonomy, but which allows to you to continue learning, and to be surrounded by fascinating people – then go for it. It can be challenging, especially as an early career researcher, but the opportunities are only expanding with the increasing collection and availability of cross-sectoral data.

What’s next on the research horizon for you?

The ECHILD team have been working hard to facilitate other researchers to use the data resources that we have created, and I’m excited about seeing some emerging findings from the projects that have been proposed. There’s some fascinating research going on, including:

• Looking at the health of underserved groups who are typically excluded from research (e.g. unaccompanied asylum seekers or migrant mothers);

• Evaluating educational outcomes for children with rare conditions for whom it has historically been difficult to obtain data on large enough samples (e.g. Hirschsprung’s disease);

• Exploring the intergenerational transmission of risk through linkage of family members (e.g. the impact of preconception health or maternal involvement with social care services on child health and development).

If you could make one change in the world today, what would it be?

I think it has to be the climate. All the incremental improvements to health that our research can support will be a drop in the ocean unless we can properly address climate change.