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Department of Public Health and Primary Care (PHPC)

The Department of Public Health and Primary Care (PHPC) is one of Europe’s leading academic departments of population health sciences. It comprises over 400 staff and graduate students, including more than 25 professors, readers, university lecturers, and other senior academic staff.  

Groups in the Department are underpinned by major programme grants, such as those from the UK Medical Research Council (MRC), the Wellcome Trust, the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Cancer Research UK, the UK National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), the European Union, the US National Institutes of Health, industry, and other sources.   

The Department provides internationally-recognised expertise in: genetic epidemiology, biomarkers, cohort studies, quantitative methods, public health, primary care, and behavioural sciences.  

Major areas of application include common chronic diseases (eg, cardiometabolic diseases, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases), and major behavioural risk factors driving these conditions (e.g., consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and adverse diets).   

The Department benefits greatly from the expertise arising from its strategic collaborations with the Genome Campus, Quantitative MRC Units and genomic medicine. 

It provides excellent training and educational programmes in biostatistics, epidemiology, public health, and primary care, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, including training of Academic Clinical Fellows. 

Latest news

Dr Ben Bowers appointed to Assistant Professor of Primary Care

30 June 2025

We are pleased to announce that Dr Ben Bowers has been appointed to the role of Assistant Professor of Primary Care within the Primary Care Unit, Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. Dr Bowers is a clinical academic community nurse and a longstanding member of the Palliative &...

Efforts to detect atrial fibrillation do not need to involve primary care and need only minimal support

27 June 2025

Chief Investigator for SAFER, Professor Jonathan Mant, and the hand-held ECG device (Zenicor) used in the study. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common heart condition associated with one-third of strokes, and many people are undiagnosed. If AF is identified and patients are given an anticoagulant (blood thinner), 300,000...

Performance of deep-learning-based approaches to improve polygenic scores

27 June 2025

Dr Martin Kelemen, Professor Mike Inouye and Professor Adam Butterworth, Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit, Department of Public Health and Primary Care Deep-learning approaches have become popular with many successful applications in a variety of fields. Neural-networks achieve their impressive performance by leveraging...