Rate My Professor Ruth Dundas

Professor Ruth Dundas is Professor of Social Epidemiology in the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow's School of Health & Wellbeing. She holds a BSc (Hons) in Statistics from the University of Glasgow and an MSc in Social Research Methods and Statistics from City University. Dundas has worked at the Unit since 1995, advancing to her current professorial position. She leads the workstream on Understanding Inequalities within the Inequalities in Health Programme and co-leads the School's Data Science Research Theme. As principal investigator for the Maternal and Child Health Network (MatCHNet), she develops infrastructure for policy evaluations using administrative data on maternal and child health. She also co-leads the Inequalities and Justice workstream in the NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Social and Environmental Determinants of Health Inequalities, collaborating with partners in Brazil (CIDACS) and Ecuador to create small area deprivation measures for global health applications.

Her research examines inequalities in mortality and contextual and social influences on health over the lifecourse, employing natural experimental designs to assess social policy impacts on maternal and child health. Dundas's methodological contributions include improving routine data usage for health inequalities analysis, evaluating complex interventions, and advancing multilevel modelling techniques. Notable publications encompass 'The health impact of Scotland's Baby Box Scheme: a natural experiment evaluation using national linked health data' (The Lancet Public Health, 2023), 'Pathways to inequalities in child health' (Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2019), 'Excess mortality in England and Scotland in 2022: The long shadow of austerity and the return to an unacceptable pre-pandemic baseline' (Journal of Critical Public Health, 2026), and 'A small area deprivation index for monitoring and evaluating health inequalities in a diverse, low and middle income country: the Índice Brasileiro de Privação (IBP)' (International Journal of Population Data Science, 2025). She promotes public engagement via a jigsaw tool for mortality inequalities findings and 'meet the expert' sessions at the Glasgow Science Centre. Dundas is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society since 1995, a Member of the Faculty of Public Health since 2023, and has held committee roles in the Royal Statistical Society Glasgow Local Group and the Society for Social Medicine and Population Health.