Dr. Hynek Pikhart
Environmental epidemiology

Hynek’s current and past research has focused on within- and between-countries inequalities in health and determinants of health in European populations including: (i) research on the measurement of socioeconomic position across the life-course and its relation to health and developmental outcomes; (ii) ageing research with focus on statistical methods to investigate longitudinal changes in cognitive and physical functioning, (iii) investigation of the role of health behaviours in explaining social variations in health, and (iv) evaluating the role of social, behavioural and biological risk factors in Eastern vs. Western European differences in health.

Hynek is a Professor of Epidemiology and Medical Statistics at University College London. He gained his MSc at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic in 1993. In 1995 he obtained a Masters in Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. In 2000 he finished his PhD in Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL and has worked in the department since 1999.

Hynek’s research activities in the recent years have concentrated on following projects: INEQCITIES, HAPIEE, DRIVERS, EURO-HEALTHY and the CHANCES consortium. Most recently he has been a member of Masaryk University-UCL team awarded EU-Horizon 2020-funded Teaming and Twinning projects with the aim to establish environmental health research hub in Brno, with UCL being the leading Western European partner.

He has written or co-authored 120 scientific papers and other publications since 2009, has more than 7600 citations and an h-index of 36. He has successfully supervised or co-supervised to completion a total of 15 PhD students, and is currently supervising several more.  students.

He has been involved in range of various consortia formed for collaborative purposes, such as NCD Risk Factors Collaboration or several Mendelian randomization consortia, which resulted in range of high-profile papers in journal such as The Lancet, BMJ or eLife. In past few months he has been invited to become a member of WHO/ILO working group with the aim to estimate the burden of work-related disease and injuries. These collaborations and consortia allowed him to establish strong links with research teams and institutions within and outside Europe, and these links will allow Masaryk University-based cohort studies to be included in range of international partnerships in the area of epidemiology and public health.