Rate My Professor Ruth Cunningham

Research Associate Professor Ruth Cunningham serves as Head of the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington, a public health physician and epidemiologist. She holds the degrees MBChB, MPH, FNZCPHM, and PhD from the University of Otago, where her doctoral research examined cancer in the context of severe mental illness in New Zealand through an epidemiological study. Cunningham teaches Public Health Ethics and public health topics to medical students.

Her research specializations include mental health research, social epidemiology, cancer epidemiology, and health services research, with the main focus of her current work on mental health epidemiology and the physical health of people with experience of mental health conditions. She is Director of the EleMent research group, Te Raraunga Hinengaro, a multidisciplinary team that leverages routinely collected electronic data from health and other sources to understand the distribution and determinants of mental health and mental distress, aiming to improve mental health outcomes for New Zealanders. As principal investigator of the Health Research Council-funded Tupuānuku project, she investigates factors contributing to inequities in physical health outcomes for people with mental illness or addiction in Aotearoa. Additional projects analyze mental health service use in later life, mental health care in emergency departments, mental health service provision for Māori, and the health and wellbeing impacts of incarceration for Māori in collaboration with Dr Paula King. Key publications encompass Heinz et al. (2025) 'Mediating pathways between resilience, mental health and wellbeing: A scoping review of individual, social, and systemic factors' in BMC Public Health; Foley et al. (2025) 'Ambulatory sensitive hospitalisations among people accessing mental health and addiction services' in the New Zealand Medical Journal; King et al. (2025) 'Health in justice or health injustice? Indigenous Māori experiences of primary care following release from New Zealand prisons' in Social Science & Medicine; and earlier contributions on cancer survival in the context of mental illness.