DIAS Event: Enabling behaviour change for health and sustainability by Prof. Susan Michie

About the lecture
Enabling behaviour change at individual, community and populations levels is at the heart of addressing the many societal problems and crises we face, including in the areas of health and sustainability.  Behaviour change is not easy and there is a science of behaviour change that needs to be drawn on to understand behaviours in their contexts and develop interventions and policies that are likely to be effective.This talk will present widely-used methods for doing this, using the COM-B model of behaviour and the Behaviour Change Wheel framework.  I will present examples to illustrate this approach and demonstrate how  systematic behaviour analysis and frameworks can enable precise, evidence-based strategies. These tools can also be used to facilitate knowledge sharing, accelerate scientific progress, and improve health and environmental outcomes across systems and populations.

About the speaker
Susan Michie, FMedSci, FAcSS, FBA, FSBM is Professor of Health Psychology, University College London, UK. She is Director of its Centre for Behaviour Change. (www.ucl.ac.uk/behaviour-change) and co-Director of WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Behavioural and Implementation Sciences for Health, and co-Director of Behavioural Research-UK (www.br-uk.ac.uk), a leadership hub to advance behavioural research across the UK.  Her undergraduate degree was in Experimental Psychology, Masters in Clinical Psychology and D.Phil in Developmental Psychology. Her research focuses on human behaviour change in relation to health and the environment: how to understand it theoretically and apply theory and evidence to intervention and policy development, evaluation and implementation. Her research, collaborating with disciplines such as information science, environmental science, computer science and medicine, covers population, organisational and individual-level interventions. She has pioneered methods for investigating and synthesising evidence e.g. the Human Behaviour-Change Project (www.humanbehaviourchange.org) and the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology (www.BCIOntology.org). She has published >600 journal articles and several books, including the Behaviour Change Wheel: A Guide to Designing Interventions (www.behaviourchangewheel.com). She is a Lancet commissioner for “Evidence-Based Implementation in Global Health” and is past chair of WHO’s Behavioural Insights and Sciences Technical Advisory Group, and member of the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group in Emergencies.

The event is organized by Nikos Ntoumanis