Natasha Chilman is a Teaching Fellow and Research Associate in Population Health for the UKRI Population Health Improvement (PHI-UK), Population Mental Health Consortium. She is based in the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience.

The PHI-UK Population Mental Health Consortium brings together 10+ partnerships across universities, local government, voluntary organisations and people with lived experience, to understand what can be done to prevent the onset of mental health problems, using insights from large-scale linked data. The consortium focusses on three challenge areas: children and young people, suicide and self-harm prevention, and multiple long-term conditions.

Natasha is working on the Training and Capacity-Building platform for the Consortium, which aims to develop a unique and tailored education and training programme in public mental health.

Prior to this role, Natasha completed her PhD research which focused on inequalities in mental health and multimorbidity for people who have experienced homelessness. Natasha's PhD was funded by the ESRC LISS-DTP CASE scheme and was in collaboration with the nationwide charity Rethink Mental Illness.

She conducted a series of studies spanning multiple methods – including a systematic review and meta-analysis, statistical analyses of nationally representative survey data, and a qualitative interview study – to systematically assess and better understand mental and physical multimorbidity for people who have previously experienced homelessness. Natasha collaborated with people with lived experience of homelessness throughout the research process.

Natasha was awarded a Data Impact Fellowship from the UK Data Service in 2023. You can read more about her research in her blog here. She has presented her research at a range of national and international conferences, including the World Congress of Epidemiology, the EPA Section of Epidemiology and Social Psychiatry Conference, and the Pathways from Homelessness Conference.

Prior to her PhD, Natasha studied Psychology at the University of Sheffield and went on to complete an MSc in Clinical Mental Health Sciences at University College London. In between her studies, Natasha worked as a support worker in crisis recovery houses for people with mental illnesses for the charity Rethink Mental Illness, and later worked as the acting service manager for a 17-bed crisis house. In this setting she often worked to support people who were experiencing mental distress or illness and social exclusion.

Natasha also previously worked as a research assistant in the Department of Psychological Medicine, IoPPN, supervised by Dr Jayati Das-Munshi. Natasha worked on an interdisciplinary project which used natural language processing to text-mine occupations from mental health electronic health records for the first time. Natasha utilised this methodology to examine predictors of unemployment in patients with severe mental illness, with a focus on ethnicity. Natasha also worked on a data linkage between mental health electronic health records and the UK Census data.

Research interests

Natasha’s research interests are in health inequalities, inclusion health, homelessness, multimorbidity, innovative research methods, health informatics, and the wider social determinants of health.

Teaching

Natasha was the module co-ordinator on the Small Group Tutorials module, for the Mental Health Studies MSc.

She will be working on the upcoming Public Health and Mental Health module, for the Public Health MSc (Online).

Natasha has also co-supervised medical student interns and undergraduate students for their research projects.