Year James Spence Medal awarded: 2019
Professor Alan Emond retired as full time Professor of Child Health at the University of Bristol and Director of the Centre for Child and Adolescent Health and Children's Burns Research Centre in 2018. He is one of the most distinguished UK researchers into issues around paediatrics in the community, including child and adolescent injury, epidemiology and health service evaluation. This has included work on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC - Children of the Nineties). He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, with teaching interests in inter-professional learning and international health. He has extensive overseas experience, working in Jamaica, Ethiopia and Brazil, including community-based research projects evaluating the impact of interventions on child health.
His many publications have spanned this range of interests, and in 2018 alone the peer-reviewed papers to which he contributed include Acculturation, resilience and the mental health of migrant youth: a cross-country comparative study, Prenatal lead, cadmium and mercury exposure and associations with motor skills at age 7 years in a UK observational birth cohort, Prevention of sports injuries in children at school: a systematic review of policies and Association of autistic traits with depression from childhood to age 18 years.
In addition to his research work, Professor Emond has also been deeply involved in teaching work for many years. This currently includes teaching on the University of Bristol’s BScs in Global Health and Child Health in the Early Years, and the SW Paediatric Registrar Programme.
Alan Emond has also undertaken a number of roles in the organisations which help support paediatrics as a whole, including a term as Chair of BACCH. But it is for his extensive and wide-ranging research work that he was primarily commended for the James Spence Medal.