Rate My Professor Geri McLeod

Dr. Geri McLeod is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Otago, Christchurch, within the Faculty of Medicine. She holds a BSc, an MSc, and a PhD, with postgraduate studies in social psychology, human development, and public health. Her research interests include mental health, the psychosocial causes and consequences of overweight and obesity, and the primary prevention of sunburn. McLeod's expertise extends to public health and preventive medicine, specifically predictors of obesity among adults, sunburn and skin cancer prevention, and human development trajectories among members of the Christchurch Health and Development Study birth cohort.

McLeod contributes significantly to the Christchurch Health and Development Study (CHDS), a longitudinal prospective birth cohort study in New Zealand. Her publications address key public health issues, including McLeod, G. F. H., Cleland, L., Welch, J., Spittlehouse, J. K., Fenton, A., Boden, J. M., & Horwood, L. J. (2022). Menopause status and climacteric symptoms in a birth cohort of mid-life New Zealand women. Climacteric, 25(3), 271-277; Crossin, R., Cleland, L., McLeod, G. F. H., Beautrais, A., Witt, K., & Boden, J. M. (2022). The association between alcohol use disorder and suicidal ideation in a New Zealand birth cohort. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 56(12), 1576-1586; Monk, N. J., McLeod, G. F. H., Mulder, R. T., Spittlehouse, J. K., & Boden, J. M. (2022). Expanding the system: A brief psychosocial complex systems model of internalising disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders, 303, 297-300; Saunders, K. R. K., Landau, S., Howard, L. M., Fisher, H. L., Arseneault, L., McLeod, G. F. H., & Oram, S. (2023). Past-year intimate partner violence perpetration among people with and without depression: An individual participant data meta-mediation analysis. Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 58, 1735-1747; Fergusson, D. M., McLeod, G. F. H., Horwood, L. J., Swain, N. R., Chapple, S., & Poulton, R. (2015). Life satisfaction and mental health problems (18 to 35 years). Psychological Medicine, 45(11), 2427-2436. Recent studies include childhood air pollution exposure related to cognitive and mental health outcomes (Hobbs et al., 2025) and caries trajectories from childhood to adulthood (Ruiz et al., 2025). Her work has been cited over 2,930 times on Google Scholar, impacting fields like epidemiology, obesity, skin cancer prevention, and menopause.