Morten Skovdal

Morten Skovdal is a professor and a community health psychologist working in the field of global health. His research focuses on the contextual factors and relational processes that shape engagement with health services and promote psychosocial wellbeing and care in the community. He is particularly interested in involving underserved groups in research, both to challenge dominant narratives, and to attune interventions to their lived realities. Much of his work has been conducted with children and young people facing global challenges, such as HIV, climate change, and migration.

Morten received his PhD from the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2009. He also holds a BSc from the LSE and an MSc from University College London. Before taking up his academic position, Morten worked for Save the Children and other non-governmental organisations in Africa. Morten sits on the editorial boards of the Health Education Journal, and Vulnerable Children and Youth Studies and acts as commissioning editor for Children's Geographies.

Current research

• Participatory research with forcibly displaced persons in South Sudan and Uganda to understand how mobility affects their chronic disease care (PI, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, 2022-2027)
• Participatory research with children and young people in Tanzania to understand their experiences, struggles and ways of coping with the climate crisis, at home and in their communities (PI, funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2021-2026)
• Participatory research with young men who have sex with men about their uptake and engagement with Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PI, funded by AIDS Fondet, 2021)
• Participatory research to understand HIV risk in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe (Lead social science collaborator, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2020-2022)
• Intervention study co-creating guidelines and associated training to help birth attenddants in Tanzania delivet safe care at bith (CO-I, funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2019-2024)
• A randomised control trial exploring what behavioural economics and community psychology interventions can do to optimise uptake of HIV prevention methods amongst young people in Zimbabwe (CO-I, funded by National Institutes of Health, US, 2018-2022)

Previous research projects have been funded by the EU/H2020, the World Health Organisation, the Danish Research Council, Wellcome Trust, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the Norwegian Research Council and the ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research. Morten is a principal investigator at the Manicaland Centre for Public Health Research in Zimbabwe.

Teaching

Morten runs two qualitative methods courses for Public Health students and supervises dissertation and thesis work in his areas of expertise. He currently supervises nine PhD students.