Charlie joined the British Heart Foundation Research Group in October 1998 after working in health promotion for five years. He has extensive experience of lecturing, teaching and training principles and methods of evaluation, health behaviour change and health promotion.
He is developing a programme of research on the relationship between the environment and physical activity. This work involves the development of measures of the environment, assessing perceptions and audit instruments of the built environment and green space. He has recently published a series of UK studies looking at the associations between the environment and physical activity.
Since 2005 he has also been the Director of the Centre for Public Health Evidence for Physical Activity for NICE, with Loughborough University. He has led a collaboration of leading UK academics producing reviews of epidemiology, determinants, interventions and health economics on a wide range of approaches to promote physical activity for children and adults. He is the lead reviewer for the Cochrane Collaboration review “Interventions to promote physical activity for adults”.
He has also been awarded research grants looking at national and international policies to promote physical activity and is currently working with the UK’s Department of Health evaluating policy related research and development activity for obesity.