Professor Jill Pell is the Director of the Institute of Health and Wellbeing and Henry Mechan Professor of Public Health at Glasgow University. She studied medicine at Edinburgh University and trained in general practice before being awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship to train in health services research. She moved to Glasgow in 1994 to train in public health and was an NHS Consultant in public health for eight years.
In 2006 she was appointed Professor of Cardiovascular Epidemiology in the BHF Glasgow Cardiovascular Centre. One year later she moved to her current post. Jill has championed the use of routine data and record linkage as a resource for research for more than 20 years. She was Deputy Director then Director of Farr Scotland. She chaired the MRC’s population health sciences committee for four years and is currently a member of MRC Council and the British Heart Foundation’s Programme Grants Committee.
Jill is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Her study on the impact of smoke free legislation on myocardial infarction, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was voted by the American Heart and Stroke Associations to be the most important research advance of the year. She was awarded the CBE in 2017 for services to public health research.
