Rate My Professor Marcus Gurtner

Marcus Gurtner serves as a Research Fellow in the Health Promotion and Policy Research Unit (HePPRU) within the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington, part of the Faculty of Medicine in the Health Sciences Division. He holds a PhD and a Master of Public Health from the University of Otago. His academic interests encompass health promotion, preventive medicine, health behavior, health inequality, public health communication, health disparities, and evidence-based medicine. Gurtner's research utilizes innovative objective methodologies, including wearable cameras and screen recordings, to examine children's exposures to various health risks in everyday environments.

For his Master of Public Health thesis, Gurtner explored child exposure to second-hand smoke within private spaces, comparing self-reported survey data with photographic evidence obtained via wearable cameras. He is currently a PhD student in HePPRU, with a thesis titled 'Kids online: An objective analysis of children's lives online,' supervised by Moira Smith, Louise Signal, and Ryan Gage. This work builds on the Kids Online Aotearoa Study, for which he co-authored the protocol published in 2022. Key publications include 'Child's-eye views of smartphone-based gaming content: objective insights from Aotearoa New Zealand' (2025, Health Promotion International), 'Clearing the haze: novel methodology objectively assessing children's online exposure to tobacco and vape marketing' (2025, Health Promotion International), 'Why is regulation of the online world urgently needed to protect children’s wellbeing?' (2024), 'Fun, food and friends: A wearable camera analysis of children's school journeys' (2023), 'Objective Assessment of the Nature and Extent of Children’s Internet-Based World: Protocol for the Kids Online Aotearoa Study' (2022, JMIR Research Protocols), 'Generating political priority for skin cancer primary prevention: A case study from Aotearoa New Zealand' (2021, Health Promotion Journal of Australia), and 'Are children smoke-free at home? Using wearable cameras to study children's exposure to smoking and smoking paraphernalia in private spaces' (2018, Child: Care, Health and Development). These contributions provide empirical insights into children's encounters with smoking paraphernalia, vaping promotions, gaming content, unhealthy foods, and policy priorities for health protection.