Meredith Leston

Meredith is a public health consultant and researcher who is passionate about using her skillset to address modern health challenges and to improve public services and patient outcomes in the UK and abroad. She specialises in the design, implementation and scale of public health and social impact interventions and was most recently appointed a Tony Blair Institute for Global Change Fellow out of recognition of her success in this area and current research scope. In the first steps of her working life, she has established a strong track record for bringing scientific and technical insight into real-world health and social care problems at national and international levels. With experience pursuing positive outcomes in these areas across commercial, clinical, academic and philanthropic settings, she is a passionate believer in the value of cross-sector collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches when tackling intractable social and medical issues.

She possesses both a Master's degree focused in Public Health from Imperial College London (Merit) and a BA in Experimental Psychology from The University of Oxford (First Class). She is a TedXOxford Alum and has had her writing featured in Cosmopolitan, The Observer, About Time Magazine, Phoenix Magazine and Tortoise Media. She has also acted as a contributor on health and wellbeing for the BBC (Woman's Hour, BBC Five Live, BBC News) and holds the Prime Ministerial 'Point of Light' and 'South West Surrey Hero' Awards for excellence in advocacy and public service. Her work within social change and inclusive technological innovation was recognised by her winning of the Alan Turing Institute's Community Award, being shortlisting for The Future Stars of Tech's Diversity Advocate Award and being nominated into both the 50:50 'Ask Her To Stand' political development scheme and McKinsey and Company's 'Next Generation Women Leaders' group.

Balanced (sometimes very precariously!) with her own recovery from Long COVID, she is currently pursuing her DPhil in Primary Health Care at the University of Oxford as an Oxford-MRC Enterprise iCASE Award Winner. Her research here is focused on developing a real-time vaccine benefit-risk platform capable of monitoring and differentiating seasonal vaccine effectiveness, uptake and adverse effects amongst immunocompromised patient groups - the first of its kind. Her work utilises a combination of routinely collected primary care medical record data (courtesy of the Oxford-Royal College of General Practitioners' Research and Surveillance Centre) and biological specimen data (virology and serology) and aims to inform vaccine scheduling and dosing amongst a vulnerable group that may, one day, include Long COVID patients.