Associate Professor of Evidence-Based Intervention and Policy Evaluation, University of Oxford

David Humphreys is an Associate Professor of Evidence-Based Intervention and Policy Evaluation. He is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose research spans several fields including: criminology, social (or public) policy, public health, and epidemiology. His main topic of interest focuses on the causes, consequences and prevention of violence and injury. Much of his research investigates how structural changes - such as laws, regulations or changes to the built environment - impact on the rate and/or distribution of harm in the population. His work stretches across several topic areas including: Violence and injury prevention (including: alcohol-related violence, gun violence, knife crime, intimate partner violence, child maltreatment, suicide, motor vehicle accidents, other); Alcohol and drug misuse; Changes to the built environment and urban design; Physical inactivity; Methods for evaluating complex population level interventions (i.e. laws, regulations, policies).

David’s research typically utilises observational or non-randomised research designs. As a consequence, his research and teaching bring together an interest in methodological aspects of intervention research, such as: the design of complex interventions (natural and quasi-experiments); the measurement of physical harms and its related environmental exposures; and the assessment and synthesis of equity effects.

He joined the Department in October 2013, having previously held research positions at the Institute of Public Health and the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. He completed his doctorate at the Institute of Criminology, at the University of Cambridge, in 2011.

David has affiliations with the Violence Research Centre at the University of Cambridge and is affiliated with the Penn Injury Science Center at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held research grants from the NIHR, ESRC and the Joyce Foundation, among others.