Michael Marmot

Sir Michael Gideon Marmot (born 26 February 1945) is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London.

He is currently the Director of The UCL Institute of Health Equity.

Marmot has led research groups on health inequalities for over thirty years, working for various international and governmental bodies.

In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Marmot was born in London on 26 January 1945.

His department includes the MRC National Survey of Health & Development, a longitudinal study directed by Professor Michael Wadsworth of people born in Britain in 1946 and followed up since.

There are 120 other academic staff in the department.

Marmot has a special interest in inequalities in health and their causes, and has been a government advisor in seeking to identify ways to mitigate them.

He served on the Scientific Advisory Group of the Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health chaired by Sir Donald Acheson, the former UK chief medical officer.

When he was a young child, his family moved to Sydney in Australia, where he attended Sydney Boys High School (1957–1961) and graduated with an MBBS medical degree from the University of Sydney in 1969.

He earned an MPH degree in 1972 and a PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley for research into acculturation and coronary heart disease in Japanese Americans.

Marmot was elected as a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP) in 1989.

He became a fellow of the Faculty of Public Health (FFPHM) in 1989, a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2008, and was elected an honorary fellow of the British Academy (Hon FBA) also in 2008.

Marmot was elected member of the Academia Europaea in 1995.

Marmot was appointed Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to public health.

This reported in November 1998.

In The Status Syndrome: How your social standing directly affects your health and life expectancy, he argues that socio-economic position is an important determinant for health outcomes.

This result holds even if we control for the effects of income, education and risk factors (such as smoking) on health.

The causal pathway Marmot identifies concerns the psychic benefits of "being in control" of one's life.

Autonomy in this sense is related to our socio-economic position.

Based on comparative studies, Marmot argues that we can make our society more participatory and inclusive to increase overall public health.

He was a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution for six years and in the New Year Honours 2000 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, for services to epidemiology and the understanding of health inequalities.

Marmot advised the WHO.

He was chair of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), which was set up by the World Health Organization 2005, and in August 2008 he produced for the commission a report called Closing the Gap in a Generation.

Marmot gave the Harveian Oration in 2006.

He leads the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), and is engaged in several international research efforts on the social determinants of health.

He has been furthermore elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health (Hon FRSPH) in 2008, an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (Hon FRCPsych) in 2013, and an honorary fellow of the Faculty of Public Health (Hon FFPH).

Marmot is a Foreign Associate Member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

Marmot conducted ground-breaking studies of heart disease and stroke, comparing Japanese people in Japan (high stroke rates, low heart attack rates) with those in Hawaii and California, where, especially in later generations, the disease patterns became reversed after adopting lifestyle, stress and diet changes.

He has more recently led the Whitehall Studies of British civil servants, again focusing on heart disease and other disease patterns.

In 2008, Marmot appeared in Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?, an American documentary series examining the social determinants of health that drew heavily from Marmot's work on the Whitehall Studies.

On 6 November 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that the Secretary of State for Health Alan Johnson had asked Marmot to chair a review of health inequalities in England; to inform policy making and address health inequalities from 2010.

The review was announced at the launch of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health report Closing the Gap in a Generation.

He served as president of the British Medical Association (BMA) from 2010 to 2011, and is the new president of the British Lung Foundation.

The review was published in 2010 entitled Fair society, healthy lives : the Marmot Review.

He has won several awards including 2012 Lifetime Award Fellowship Eur Academy of Occupational Health Psychology, 2012 Patron of Medsin-UK, 2010 Manchester Doubleday Award, and 2004 Alwyn Smith Prize Medal.

Marmot served as president of the World Medical Association for 2015–16.

In 2020, Marmot co-authored Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On. It found that life expectancy is falling among the poorest people and particularly amongst women in certain English regions.

Published in the same year, Build Back Fairer: The COVID-19 Marmot Review explored connections between inequality in socioeconomic conditions and COVID-19 death tolls, recommending investing in public health.

In 2021, a follow-up report looking at Greater Manchester noted a greater fall in life expectancy in the poorer areas of the county.