Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2020

This year’s lecture in memory of Sir Roger Jowell – the co-founder of the European Social Survey – will be held online on Wednesday 16 September.

The Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2020 will be delivered by health expert Sir Michael Marmot, Director of the Institute of Health Equity (Department of Epidemiology & Public Health, UCL)

Sir Michael, a close friend of Sir Roger, will deliver the online lecture – Social justice and health equity – from 6pm (UTC+1) on Wednesday 16 September.

The event will be chaired by Caroline Costongs, Director of EuroHealthNet – a not-for-profit partnership of organisations working on public health, disease prevention, promoting health and reducing inequalities.

Sir Michael has been Professor of Epidemiology at University College London since 1985. In 2010, he published Fair Society Healthy Lives (The Marmot Review) which was updated earlier this year.

He is currently an advisor to the Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the social determinants of health in the new WHO Division of Healthier Populations.

In the lecture, Professor Marmot will explain how taking action to reduce health inequalities is a matter of social justice and, whilst economic circumstances are important, they are not the only drivers of health inequalities.

Sir Michael will present evidence that national, regional and local policy intervention can make a difference but should not be confined to the health care system: policies need to address the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.

Organised by City, University of London, NatCen Social Research and the Social Research Association, the lecture will be held in webinar format for the first time.

Sir Roger Jowell, CBE (26 March 1942 – 25 December 2011), was an outstanding British social statistician and academic who founded Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR) – now NatCen Social Research – and the European Social Survey.

Sir Roger also made a major contribution to the development of robust comparative research through the International Social Survey Programme.

Professor Marmot will become the seventh speaker to deliver the Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture since 2014.

Previous speakers have included: Sir Andrew Dilnot (Social statistics and public policy); Professor John Curtice (Scottish independence referendum); Professor Anne Johnson (National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles) and Professor Jane Green (British Elections Study).

You can watch recordings of the 2017 lecture delivered by Professor Anand Menon (UK in a changing Europe); and last year’s lecture by Professor Alissa Goodman and Rt Hon David Laws (Social inequalities in education).

The event is free to attend but registration is essential as places are limited.

Update: a recording of the event is now available