Professor Conny Guell

Professor Cornelia (Conny) Guell is Associate Professor (Reader) in Anthropology of Health and Environment at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health, which she led as Co-Director (Jan 2022 - July 2024), and the Deputy-Director of Postgraduate Research at the Department for Public Health and Sports Science.

Her research addresses key planetary health priorities to create healthy, sustainable and socially just environments in both Global South and Global North settings with a focus particularly on food systems for better nutrition and healthy infrastructure to support physically active lives. Conny leads highly interdisciplinary international research teams across the social sciences, humanities, health and environmental sciences in Small Island Developing States as well as European settings and the UK funded by most major UK funders.

Conny leads the ECEHH research theme Food Systems and Planetary Health. She is also a member of the steering group of Exeter Food, member of the Food, Nutrition & Health research group, and co-investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environment of Health.

Conny designs and leads undergraduate and postgraduate modules and teaching on social contexts of health and the environment, global health, and qualitative research methods. She is external examiner for the University of Cambridge, the University of the West Indies and the University of the South Pacific.

Conny's social theoretical scholarship aims to understand and address the complex interaction between systems transformation and behaviour change. As a medical anthropologist, Conny's expertise lies in transdisciplinary research designs that focus on socio-cultural, historical and political-economic influences on health behaviour, and methods development for in-depth qualitative and participatory co-design and evaluation of complex interventions and natural experiments.

Methodological expertise includes:

Methods development of participatory, citizen-science approaches to the co-design and evaluation of complex interventions and public health policy;

In-depth ethnographic, policy and historical analysis of underlying socio-cultural contexts of drivers of non-communicable diseases;

Transdisciplinary research designs to co-develop novel research agendas across social sciences, humanities, health and environmental sciences;

Qualitative and mixed-method evidence synthesis

Qualifications:

• 2022 ASPIRE Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• 2009 PhD Social Anthropology (University of Edinburgh)
• 2006 MSc by Research Anthropology of Health and Illness (University of Edinburgh)
• 2004 MSc Medical Anthropology (Brunel University)
• 2003 MA Sociology and Social Anthropology (University of Heidelberg)