Mark Gleave is the Project Support Manager for the RISE-Vac project. After graduating with a MSc in Public Health Nutrition, Mark worked within the public and third sectors in the UK, designing, delivering and contributing to public health interventions. In 2014, Mark trained in project management and since then has managed a range of multi-agency projects within health promotion focussing on issues including obesity, smoking cessation and mental health. Mark joined the UKHSA in January 2024.
Joe Harper works as a public health specialist (international health) in the health and justice team for UKHSA and is the UK programme manager for Rise-Vac. In his previous role, and in the wake of the conflict in Ukraine, Joe worked to improve the health of refugees and asylum seekers by working with system partners to achieve more equitable access to a range of health interventions including vaccines as well as to the wider determinants of health such as housing and transport. Since completing his MSc. in public health and health promotion, Joe has focussed his work on reducing health inequalities and protecting public health. Whilst working for the British Red Cross he led an innovative team working to improve patient flow in an emergency department by tackling the social determinants of health such as loneliness and deprivation. During the Covid-19 pandemic he worked as a health protection practitioner where he focussed on developing systems and processes for outbreak management as well as directly working with within outbreak control teams. In this role, Joe took a lead on the children and young people stream of work where he was able to work with key stakeholders to manage outbreaks at scale.
Emma Plugge is Senior Research Fellow in the Health and Justice team at UKHSA, and an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton. She is a public health trained doctor (graduated in medicine from the University of Cambridge) and after practising as a clinician in the UK and overseas she obtained her doctorate Public Health from the University of Oxford. She has a keen interest in education (she is a fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy) and also the health of marginalized groups, particularly the health of imprisoned people. She is currently involved in a number of research studies investigating communicable and non-communicable diseases in prisons. Her work at UKHSA as the academic lead for the WorldwidE Prison Health Research and Engagement Network (WEPHREN www.wephren.org ), a network aiming to improve the quality of prison health research globally, brings together her interest and expertise in prison health research and international capacity building for public health.