Dr Issy Bray

​Associate Professor in Public Health (School of Health and Social Wellbeing). I currently teach on the Quantitative Health Research module and the Epidemiology of Non-Communicable Disease modules (MSc Public Health) as well as supervising MSc dissertation students. I currently supervise four PhD students and three regsistrars on the South West Public Health Specialty Training Programme. My background is in statistics (MSc Medical Statistics). My PhD, at the University of Plymouth, involved the application of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to modelling the relationship between maternal age and Down syndrome risk. Postdoctoral research at the International Agency for Research on Cancer used similar models to make projections of cancer incidence and prevalence. I have previously taught statistics and public health to a wide range of students at the Universities of Plymouth and Bristol, have run short courses for ARC West as part of the Training and Capacity Building team, and have also worked as an epidemiologist within the Government Statistical Service.

My research interests broadly involve the application of statistics to health-related data. I have experience of working on randomised controlled trials, cohort studies, case-control studies and cross-sectional surveys. Much of my research has been in the field of mental health, from international comparisons of ‘happiness’ and ‘life satisfaction’ to suicide rates amongst military veterans. Recent work includes a Wellcome-funded review of the role of green spaces and natural environments in preventing anxiety and depression among young people in urban settings, and an analysis of the Bristol Quality of Life Survey data linked to GIS data on green-blue-grey infrastructure, to examine relationships with neighbourhood satisfaction, life satisfaction, wellbeing and general health (funded by the RECLAIM Network). I am currently working on a NERC/UKRI-funded project, 'Greening Prescriptions for Streets' in collaboration with the Universities of Surrey, Bath, Sheffield and Imperial.   

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