Sharon is Professor of Behavioural Sciences and Health in the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit and President of the UK Society of Behavioural Medicine. . She co-leads the Unit’s Complexity programme. She is also Head of the Population Health Research Facility, which supports the design, planning and delivery of high quality community based research and is part of the Glasgow Clinical Trials Unit. She has been a co-investigator or principal investigator on grants totalling more than £34 million from funders including the NIHR and the MRC.

She joined the Social and Public Health Sciences Unit after winning a 5 year MRC/University of Glasgow Senior Fellowship, prior to that she was a Senior Research Fellow/Associate Director at the South East Wales Trials Unit at the University of Cardiff. She has also held posts at the Universities of Sheffield, Oxford, Nottingham and Greenwich.

Sharon leads a programme of work on developing and testing complex interventions for lifestyle behaviours (diet, physical activity, smoking), healthy ageing, obesity and mental health. She is also interested in social networks, systems thinking and mobile health technologies. She has methodological expertise in randomised controlled trials and in the development and evaluation of complex interventions, as well as mixed methods approaches and process evaluation.

Sharon has been a member of the Chief Scientist Office, Health Improvement Protection and Services Committee and the National Institute for Health Research Health Technology Assessment Programme Clinical Evaluation and Trials Committee and the National Institute for Health Research Policy Research Programme. She is also a member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity and BMC Public Health.