LIPH Steering Group

Director of the Institute of Health Equity (UCL Department of Epidemiology & Public Health)

Sir Michael Marmot has been Professor of Epidemiology at University College London since 1985. He is the author of The Health Gap: the challenge of an unequal world (Bloomsbury: 2015), and Status Syndrome: how your place on the social gradient directly affects your health (Bloomsbury: 2004). Professor Marmot is the Advisor to the WHO Director-General, on social determinants of health, in the new WHO Division of Healthier Populations; Distinguished Visiting Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong (2019-), and co-Director of the of the CUHK Institute of Health Equity.

Chair of the British Library, the Centre for Ageing Better, and Think Ahead

Professor Dame Carol Black is currently Chair of the British Library, the Centre for Ageing Better, and Think Ahead, the Government’s fast-stream training programme for Mental Health Social Workers. She co-chairs NHS England/Improvement’s Expert Advisory Group on Employee Health and Wellbeing. She is a member of RAND Europe’s Council of Advisers, and of the Boards of the Institute for Employment Studies and UKActive. In 2022 she was appointed Independent Adviser to the Government on combatting misuse of drugs.

Chair of the LIPH Steering Group, Chief Executive of the Impact Investing Institute

From 2016 to 2023, Kieron was the Chief Executive of Guy's and St Thomas' Foundation, one of the world's oldest health foundations. Through this period, the foundation developed some of the UK’s most innovative and impactful alliances to reduce health inequalities, as well as transformed its £1 billion investment arm into one of Europe's leading responsible and health impact investors. He previously worked in No.10 Downing Street and at the Boston Consulting Group. Kieron is a Governor of the Southbank Centre, Europe’s largest arts centre; and on the Boards of Big Society Capital and the Design Council. He sits on the IPPR cross-party Commission into Health and Prosperity.

Director of Levelling-Up at Legal and General

John Godfrey has worked in the City of London for over thirty years, including for US, Japanese and European financial institutions. He joined Legal & General in 2006, and over the following decade was responsible for group communications, public policy issues and the group brand. He is also Executive sponsor for wellbeing. From 2016-17 John worked at Number Ten Downing Street as Head of Policy for Prime Minister Theresa May, where his team was responsible for advice on a broad range of UK domestic and Brexit-related issues.

Chair, Commonwealth Fund

David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P., is President of the Commonwealth Fund. Previously, he served as Chief Health Information and Innovation Officer at Partners Health System and was Samuel O. Thier Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. From 2009 to 2011, Dr. Blumenthal was the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology under President Barack Obama. As a renowned health services researcher and national authority on health IT adoption, he has authored over 300 scholarly publications, including the seminal studies on the adoption and use of health information technology in the United States.

Chief Sustainability Officer, ABI

Ben Howarth is the ABI’s Chief Sustainability Officer and leads the ABI’s work on sustainability, including climate change and related environmental issues, alongside responsibility for the ABI’s policy work on diversity, equity and inclusion and related issues, including modern slavery.

Meg is the Senior Director for Health Equity at ICCR for leadership of ICCR’s shareholder engagement and advocacy on global and domestic health issues.

She provides leadership, expertise, and strategic direction to develop and implement coalition members’ shareholder engagement strategies with corporations. Meg also supports member engagements with corporations, including companies in the pharmaceutical, health insurance, food and beverage, and other sectors, around access and affordability of medicine, prevention of algorithmic harms in health care and nutrition insecurity.

Meg has been working in the field of public health for 25+ years in varying capacities, including as a teacher, health educator, advocate, community researcher, and consultant. Prior to joining ICCR, she designed tools and trainings to scale access to palliative care in community settings. As a strategy consultant, she focused on building public-private partnerships to support efforts to improve access to healthcare. This involved engaging stakeholders and thought leaders from both the business and community sectors to develop a shared agenda to tackle complex health problems. As a community researcher, she collaborated with members of the education, health, government, and spiritual/faith sectors to form a coalition to target systems-level changes linked to reduced transmission of HIV among Young Men of Color Who Have Sex with Men (YMCSM).