Graham Moon, Professor of Geography, University of Southampton, UK. He is a former chair of the RGS-IBG Geography of Health Research Group. He is a member of the ESRC peer review college and has been consultant and advisor on health topics to various UK and overseas governments. He is Founding Editor of the journal Health and Place. Graham’s current research interests focus on health-related behaviour (particularly smoking and drinking among hard-to-reach groups), the contemporary fate of the sites of former psychiatric asylums and primary health care restructuring.
Graham Moon arrived in health/medical geography via undergraduate training at the University of Exeter that had no health content. His PhD at the University of Portsmouth was in urban political geography, and contained glimmerings of health in a thesis chapter on the politics of child health clinic provision. Following his PhD, Graham held a number of research posts at Portsmouth examining the externalities associated with various forms of provision for vulnerable groups. This research, with Alan Burnett, drew on the work of Michael Dear, Chris Smith and Martin Taylor, and led further down the health path. Most significant however, was the arrival in Portsmouth of Kelvyn Jones. Graham and Kelvyn collaborated on a number of significant projects in health geography including the influential book Health, Disease and Society, the first reports on health geography in Progress in Human Geography, and the introduction of multilevel modelling to health geography. This long-standing collaboration cemented the move to health, though it may also be that decades of exposure to one parent’s medical journals had some influence.
Graham has authored six books and over 100 academic papers drawing on research supported by the ESRC, various NHS sources, and industry to the tune of some 2 million pounds. He left Portsmouth in 2007 having been promoted to Professor there in 1995 and Director of Research for the University in 2001. He is a member of the Population, Health and Wellbeing research group and the Centre for Geographical Health Research at the University of Southampton. Graham’s research is set in the UK and New Zealand though he has also conducted collaborative research in France, Germany, Canada and East Central Europe. He has methodological interests in small area synthetic estimation and multilevel applications in health geography. He recently completed editing the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Health and Medical Geography with Tim Brown and Sara McLafferty. His teaching commitments focus on quantitative social science and the geographies of health, wellbeing, and health care.
Graham may be contacted at g.moon@soton.ac.uk.
Updated: November 2010
Health and Medical Geography 