Dr Pepper is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department, within the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences. She is the Programme Director for the MSc in Health Psychology and the Health & Wellbeing Lead for the Urban Futures Interdisciplinary Research Theme. She is a member of the Healthy Living Lab, the Psychobiology of Stress and Wellbeing Group, the Hoarding Research Group and the Perception Evolution & Behaviour Lab (PEBL).
Before coming to Northumbria University, Dr Pepper studied as an undergraduate at the University of Liverpool, where she won an Interdisciplinary Bridging Award to support her undergraduate research on morning sickness. She then went on to work in science policy and communication. She undertook work experience with the BBC Specialist Factual Unit (TV), and with BBC Focus Magazine. She worked for Newton’s Apple as a Policy and Project Manager, then as their Director, and for many years after that as a member of their board of Trustees. She spent 2 years working as a Communications Manager at the Department of Health, while she completed her MSc in Evolutionary Psychology at Brunel University. She was awarded a PhD in behavioural sciences from the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Newcastle University in 2015. She went on to work as a visiting postdoctoral scholar with the Newcastle City Council Public Health Team, then joined the Newcastle Institute of Health and Society, where she worked as a postdoc in the Health Psychology group with Vera Araujo-Soares. From 2016-2018, Dr Pepper worked with Daniel Nettle and Melissa Bateson, in their COMSTAR lab at Newcastle University.
Dr Pepper's research examines socioeconomic inequalities in health and wellbeing. She investigates how structural inequalities and features of human ecologies affect behaviours which, subsequently, affect health and longevity. As well as working on understanding the effects of exposure to adversity, she is particularly interested in the effects of perceived risk/safety on health behaviour. Much of her work has focussed, in collaboration with colleagues such as Prof Daniel Nettle, Dr Richard Brown, on the Uncontrollable Mortality Risk Hypothesis, and the Double Dividend of Safety. She also supports colleagues in their work on topics such as how adversity affects hoarding behaviour, and the effects of food insecurity on mind and metabolism.
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