Professor Dame Theresa Marteau is a behavioural psychologist whose research includes the development and evaluation of interventions to change behaviour (principally relating to food, tobacco and alcohol consumption) to improve population health and reduce health inequalities, with a particular focus on targeting non-conscious processes. She is Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. She is a former Fellow of Christ’s and has been an Honorary Fellow of the College since 2022.
Theresa graduated with a BSc in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1975, then went to Wolfson College, Oxford where she gained an MSc in Abnormal Psychology in 1977, and she added a PhD in Health Psychology from the University of London in 1985.
She remained at the University of London, becoming a Lecturer in Health Psychology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in 1986 and then Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology at Guy’s Hospital School of Medicine in 1993, before taking up a Professorship of Health Psychology at King’s College London in 1995 which she held until 2010.
Theresa then moved to the University of Cambridge where she became Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit. She had been elected to a Fellowship at Hughes Hall in 2008, the University conferred on her the title of Honorary Professor of Behaviour and Health in 2011 and in 2013 she became a Bye-Fellow of Christ’s College and Director of Studies in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences. She was a Fellow of the College from 2015 to 2021, and then elected to a Bye-Fellowship again before in 2022 becoming an Honorary Fellow. She is an Associate Fellow of the University’s Centre for Science and Policy.
Theresa was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017, the citation highlighting she had established a world-class behaviour change unit; demonstrated that Government policies should look at population-level interventions as well as those that focus on individuals, putting the concept of “nudge” into practice; and that she had been the Principal Investigator for the Wellcome Trust funded Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health and pioneered research into how the environment affects people’s behaviour. An example of modifying decision-making would be serving wine in smaller glasses, leading to lower alcohol consumption.