Expert Advisors

Paul is Special Advisor to the Director-General and leadership of EPHA with a particular interest in the social, economic and political determinants of health at the European level. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP London), and a Member of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom and the Society of Social Medicine.

Following university studies in international law, politics and economics at the University of Birmingham (UK), he has been closely involved in European public health advocacy and policy development in various settings for some 30 years. These include: Robert Schuman Scholarship holder and pharmaceutical regulation project lead in the Health Division of the European Parliament Secretariat; the first Policy Coordinator at the European Public Health Alliance; European Research Officer at LSE Health, London School of Economics and Political Science; Head of the Brussels Office of the European Health Management Association; and twice elected Board Member and Vice-President of the European Public Health Alliance. Paul was the Brussels representative of the Royal College of Physicians from 2002-2018 and is a long-standing member of the Expert Advisory Committee of the European Health Forum (Gastein). Paul has published on a variety of European health policy and political issues. He is the former editor – and current editorial board member – of Eurohealth magazine, published by the WHO European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. He was also the European Editor of the RCP journal Clinical Medicine.

You can follow Paul on Twitter at @PaulJBelcher.

Dr. Joan Benach is Senior Researcher, Director of the Health Inequalities Research Group- Employment Conditions Network (GREDS-EMCONET), Deputy director of the Johns Hopkins-UPF Public Policy Center, and Full Professor of Sociology and Public Health in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain). He has a varied academic background in health and social sciences including an MD, an MPH, studies in History and Methodology of Social Sciences, and a PhD in Public Health in the Johns Hopkins University. For over two decades, Joan Benach has extensively collaborated with leading international public health scientists, unions, social movements, governments and institutions, including his leadership on the Emconet Knowledge Network in the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health.  His main research contributions include original analyses on Social Determinants of Health Inequalities such as Precarious Employment and other Employment Conditions, the health intersections between Social Class, Gender, Migration, Age, and Geography, the analysis of the intersection between Society and the Environment, critical Complex Systems, and the development of Health Policy analysis and methods, topics in which he has extensively published.

Career Development Fellow, The Global Health Policy Unit – University of Edinburgh

Amandine Garde is Professor of Law and founding director of the Law & Non-Communicable Diseases Research Unit at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests lie in the fields of EU Trade, Consumer, Advertising, and Public Health Law. In particular, she has written extensively on the regulation of unfair commercial practices, particularly marketing to children, and how the European Union could promote better consumer and public health protection and use its regulatory powers to prevent obesity and other chronic diseases. She is Senior Editor of the European Journal of Risk Regulation, and Editor of Elgar’s new series Health and the Law. She regularly advises UN organisations, the European Commission and the JRC, governments, public health agencies and NGOs worldwide. In particular, she was a member of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Science and Evidence to the WHO Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity and is lead author of the report commissioned by UNICEF For a Child-Rights based approach to food marketing. She has also developed several training courses on the use of law in promoting better health and preventing chronic diseases. She is also a qualified solicitor

Dr Gabriel Siles-Brügge is an Associate Professor in Public Policy. Gabriel joined the department in September 2016 from the University of Manchester, where he was a Lecturer in Politics. Before that, Gabriel was a Lecturer in International Political Economy at Oxford Brookes University. He holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield.