Research at UCL

People and Nature Lab
The People and Nature Lab is an interdisciplinary applied research and teaching partnership developing innovative approaches to tackle the challenges posed by biodiversity loss, global ecosystem degradation and climate change, to support a more sustainable relationship between people and nature.

Community collective action to respond to climate change influencing the environment-health nexus
This project aims to mprove understanding of the pathways between climate, environment, and health to protect and promote human health and well-being in the face of climate challenges.

Eco-Capabilities: Supporting children’s wellbeing through participatory art in nature
A research project exploring how the wellbeing of children living in areas of high deprivation can be supported through working with artists in familiar outdoor places.

Person-Environment-Activity-Research Laboratory (PEARL)
PEARL is a unique facility designed to explore the ways in which people interact with their environment, and how it helps or hinders health.

Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change
‘The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change’ brings together 35 leading academic institutions and UN agencies to monitor progress, empower health professionals and support policymakers.

Reducing Overheating in Cities
HEROIC is assessing the health and economic impacts of urban scale interventions to reduce overheating in a range of cities in different climate zones and socio-economic settings.

The Lancet Series on racism, xenophobia, discrimination, and health
This Series examines how the historic systems and structures of power and oppression, and discriminatory ideologies have shaped policy and practice today, and are root causes of racial health inequities.

Tackling health disparities through social innovation
This project will work in collaboration with Brent Borough Partnership. It seeks to understand how community assets and community participation can be leveraged to address systemic health inequalities in the London Borough of Brent.

Improving the life chances of children with a City Collaboratory approach
ActEarly are developing City Collaboratories in Bradford and Tower Hamlets, to provide research-ready, people-powered and data-linked test beds to co-produce, implement and evaluate early life interventions to prevent disease and reduce inequalities.

Training the next generation of researchers in food systems
UCL is a consortium partner in the multidisciplinary UK Food Systems Centre for Doctoral Training, which aims to train the next generation of leaders for a healthy and sustainable food future.

Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health
CUSSH is a five-year international research project that will deliver key global research on the systems that connect urban development and population health.

Access to Justice
Lack of access to justice can have broader implications on health. UCL’s Integrated Legal Advice Clinic provides free legal advice to the local community in Stratford, to get the support they are entitled to.

Commercial determinants of health and health inequalities
SPECTRUM is a multi-university, multi-agency research consortium generating new evidence to inform the prevention of NCDs caused by unhealthy products. UCL is leading research to develop and integrate new data sources on smoking and alcohol, to inform action.

World-leading applied health research which meets the needs of our communities, locally and nationally
NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) North Thames is developing innovative research that responds to the needs of our local and national health and care systems and populations, through a collaboration of six leading universities, our region’s NHS and local authority organisations, industry, charities and communities.

Digital Health Hub
The hub will bring together an interdisciplinary team to better deploy digital technologies in the fight against antimicrobial resistance across humans, animals and the environment.

Mosquito population modelling for early warning system and rapid health authority response
This project seeks to bring together digital public health, computer sciences, urban water/waste sanitation treatment technologies, meteorology and climate modelling to evaluate the impacts of broader climatic and environmental changes on breeding habitats for mosquito-borne arboviruses in Northeast Brazil.

Health, diagnoses and risk
UCL leads HDR UK Phenomics, one of six National Priority Areas uniting the UK’s health data to enable discoveries that improve people’s lives.

Using Artificial Intelligence to create an online knowledge system on behaviour change
The Human Behaviour Change Project brings together behavioural scientists, computer scientists and systems architects, to use Artificial Intelligence to extract and synthesise published findings of behaviour change interventions.

Rethinking the economics of medical innovation
UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose are working with the Open Society Foundations to examine the notions of common good and public value in the biopharmaceutical sector, through a mission-oriented approach.

World-leading vaccine manufacture
Vax-Hub brings together a world-class multidisciplinary team to make radical changes in vaccine development and manufacturing technologies. They are developing tools and technologies to de-risk scale-up, enable rapid response, and to provide uninterrupted, low cost supplies of vaccines to low income countries.

ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health (ICLS)
This Centre is a pioneer of lifecourse health research, combining the latest techniques in social science and biology, to identify the pinch points in people’s lives where targeted support can help us all to flourish.

MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing
Our researchers are identifying the biological and social factors that affect lifelong health, ageing and the development of chronic disease, and developing interventions to support healthy ageing.

Economic, social and health impacts of COVID-19 using lifetime data
Our researchers are using five national longitudinal cohort studies to understand the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, the impact on inequalities, and the lifelong factors which shape vulnerability and resilience to its effects.

Children and Families Policy Research Unit
In this PRU, researchers generate evidence to improve the health of children and families and to develop methods and data resources to improve the quality and timeliness of evidence for policy.

Healthy Weight Policy Research Unit
The Healthy Weight PRU focuses on promoting healthy weight across the population.