We host regular seminars with speakers from around the world covering diverse disciplines, as well as experts from within our Department for Health and Department of Social & Policy Sciences.

In person presentations will also be hosted online via teams. Please contact Rachel Barry at rb2465@bath.ac.uk or c21ph@bath.ac.uk with any questions.

Some details may change. Please check this page regularly for updates.

Upcoming seminars

Assessing the impacts of public policy on chronic diseases driven by unhealthy commodity industries

• Host: Professor Franco Sassi, Imperial College London
• Date: Thursday 19 February 2026
• Time: 15:00 to 16:30 BST
• Location: Online

Franco Sassi is a Professor of International Health Policy and Economics at Imperial College London and is the Director of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Innovation.

Details on the talk will be shared closer to the presentation date.

Structures of Obstruction to Planetary Health Equity

• Host: Professor Sharon Friel, Australian National University
• Date: Monday 2 March 2026
• Time: 15:00 to 16:30 BST
• Location: Online and in-person

Professor Friel is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Health Equity in the School of Regulation and Global Governance. She is Director of the Planetary Health Equity Hothouse at the Australian National University. Between 2005 and 2008 she was the Head of the Scientific Secretariat (University College London) for the World Health Organisation’s landmark global Commission on Social Determinants of Health. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia, and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.

This talk explores why little effective action is taking place to ensure planetary health equity (PHE) - the equitable enjoyment of good health in a stable Earth system. Addressing PHE demands action on the global consumptogenic system – the system of institutions, policies, commercial activities and norms that incentivises the excessive extraction, production and hyper-consumption of fossil fuel-reliant goods and services. This system is not only harmful to the environment and human health, but also inequitably valued and distributed, leading to a significant concentration of wealth and power among the conservative elites and corporations who benefit from the consumptogenic system.

Much is known about the types of progressive policies that are needed to transform the consumptogenic system, including in energy, tax, housing, food, transport and other sectors. However, powerful interests work hard to prevent the necessary design, development and implementation of policy that would change the status quo that serves them well. Nothing will change unless the structures of obstruction to progressive policies in climate and inequity are addressed. While the work to understand climate action obstruction is growing, there is little attention to wealth inequities. Drawing on the work of the Climate Social Science Research Network to guide the approach, the talk will discuss some exploratory work on wealth inequities, identifying the policies that are needed to reduce wealth inequities, types of actors involved in those policy areas, and highlight some of the factors that obstruct or prevent the action from happening. Identifying the strategies and practices of obstructive forces will help inform ways to assemble counterstrategies to advance progressive policy and effective civil society.

Green Futures Network

• Host: Peter Lefort, University of Exeter
• Date: Thursday 23 April 2026
• Time: 15:00 to 16:00 BST
• Location: Online

Peter runs the Green Futures Network at the University of Exeter, which engages regional, national, and international partners in climate and environmental research.

Details on the talk will be shared closer to the presentation date.

Political economy of global food supply chains

• Host: Ben Wood, Deakin University
• Date: Wednesday 22 April 2026
• Time: 15:00 to 16:00 BST
• Location: Online

Ben is a Research Fellow with the Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE) within the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University. He is an emerging international research leader in public health whose current research mostly focuses on the political economy of food systems, as well as understanding and addressing the ways in which large corporate and financial actors adversely influence health and equity.

Details on the talk will be shared closer to the presentation date.

Polluter pays and food systems

• Host: Stephanie Walton, University of Oxford
• Date: Thursday 18 June 2026
• Time: 15:00 to 16:00 BST
• Location: TBC

Stephanie Walton is a financial geographer researching the connections, tensions, and trade-offs between what we need from our food systems and what we expect from our financial systems. She is a doctoral candidate with the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group where she is currently researching stranded assets in the transition to sustainable and healthy diets, with a specific focus on the cattle and beef sectors in the USA. Her work sits at the intersection of food systems, political economy, spatial data science, and environmental economics, which she draws on to explore the contours of financial lock-in and identify potential pathways through it.

Details on the talk will be shared closer to the presentation date.

Past seminars

Global Public Health Law: Transdisciplinary Approach to Practice and Advocacy

• Host: Professor Micah Berman, University of Ohio
• Date: Tuesday 2 December 2025
• Time: 15:30 to 17:00 BST
• Location: 1 West 3.03

Micah Berman is a Professor of Health Services Management and Policy at the Ohio State University and Professor of Law at its Moritz College of Law.

This lecture will discuss a forthcoming Oxford University Press book that aims to present this transdisciplinary approach to law students and students in a wide range of health-related disciplines. Utilising a wide range of public health topics as examples, it links to the growing field of Global Health Law by exploring health-related international legal obligations and the process of translating such commitments into effective national and sub-national laws. The book is intended to be part of a larger effort to strengthen the field of public health law by bridging the cultures of law and public health research.

New approach to understanding and addressing the commercial determinants of health

• Host: Dr Luc Hagenaars, Amsterdam University
• Date: Thursday 23 October 2025
• Time: 15:00 to 16:30 BST
• Location: 1 West 3.03

Luc Hagenaars is an assistant professor in Department of Public and Occupational Health at Amsterdam University Medical Centre

In this lecture, Luc will present a new approach where he analyzed the 2023 Lancet series on the commercial determinants of health (CDoH) with so-called system archetypes. “Archetypes” are typical combinations of a system’s structure and its problematic behavior, that occur across temporal and spatial dimensions. Due to their universality and archetypicality, they also point to typical interventions for leveraging more fundamental change. His analysis points, for instance, to how the CDoH concept infers power asymmetries due to the system being trapped into a “success to the successful” archetype, and that the peoples’ governments have become trapped in an “accidental adversarial” relationship with commercial actors. Luc is eager to discuss substantive and methodological findings and limitations of this approach.

An innovative method for examining the commercial and digital determinants of health

• Host: Dr Sherry Emery, University of Chicago
• Date: 18 September 2025
• Time: 15:00 to 16:30 BST
• Location: Online

Sherry Emery is the director of NORC's Social Data Collaboratory at the University of Chicago.

In this lecture, Sherry will present an innovative method using donated (from the users themselves) social media data for mapping and understanding how social media marketing and algorithms affect the public. At the end, we will discuss potential areas of overlap and future collaborations.

A lecture by visiting fellow Professor Heikki Hiilamo

• Host: Professor Heikki Hiilamo, University of Helskini (Finland)
• Date: Thursday 6 March 2025

Heikki Hiilamo is a Professor of Social Policy at the University of Helsinki and Research Professor at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. His current research interests include the economy of wellbeing, poverty, inequality, welfare state research and tobacco control.

Professor Hiilamo has joined the University of Bath as a new Visiting Fellow with the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) where he will be for three months from January to March 2025.

Kids Online – Where Commercial & Digital Determinants of Health Intersect: Objective research from Aotearoa

• Host: Professor Louise Signal, University of Otago (New Zealand)
• Date: Thursday 28 November 2024

The online world affords children many benefits while simultaneously exposing them to harm, including marketing for tobacco, e-cigarettes, alcohol, junk food and gambling. Yet globally, there is a dearth of objective research on children’s real-time online experiences.

Professor Signal presented the methods and initial data from Kids Online Aotearoa, an objective study of the nature and extent of children’s online world. A strategic sample of 156 12-year-olds from schools in the Wellington region of Aotearoa (New Zealand), used Zoom video conferencing software to record their online world for four days. The findings indicated an urgent need for national regulation of the online world to protect the rights of children and ensure their health and wellbeing.