Cicely Marston

I have over 25 years of experience of interdisciplinary research in health, working across sectors to understand complex problems and developing innovative research methods to inform interventions and improve evaluations, particularly in sexual and reproductive health. I take a collaborative leadership approach, and my research is underpinned and driven by a commitment to health equity.

Until 2025, I was Professor of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where I founded and led the DEPTH research group. Our programme of work spanned more than a decade, and brought together scholarship centred on community participation in health. Within sexual and reproductive health, my work has particularly focused on contraception and abortion, taking an intersectional, reproductive justice approach and accounting for the broad context of sexual practice and contraception/abortion: outside as well as within the clinic.

I studied Human Sciences BSc at Magdalen College, Oxford, and Medical Demography MSc at LSHTM. I stayed at LSHTM to do an interdisciplinary PhD and then postdoc involving research on young people’s sexual practice, participatory health promotion, and sexuality education. For my PhD fieldwork I lived in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, working with and interviewing members of marginalised communities and studying Mexfam’s internationally-renowned sexuality education programme Gente Joven.

I moved to Imperial College to continue my research and to direct a public health MSc, returning to LSHTM from 2005-2025. Over my career I have led and supervised research in Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, and Africa as well as the UK.