Manuel Franco

Manuel Franco, Social and Urban Epidemiologist, is an associate faculty at the University of Alcalá and adjunct faculty in two institutions in the USA: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the City University of New York CUNY Graduate School of Public Health. Manuel Franco trained in Medicine both in Madrid and Berlin. As a Fulbright Scholar he joined the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology to obtain his PhD and continued over one year with a Post-Doctoral fellowship in the fields of social epidemiology and urban health. Back in Europe he received the Marie Curie and Ramón y Cajal early-stage research awards. He was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant Heart Healthy Hoods (http://www.hhhproject.es) studying urban characteristics in relation to eating patterns, physical activity levels, smoking and alcohol consumption. He was also the PI of the Participatory Project on food in the cities: Photovoice Villaverde (https://youtu.be/VIiFggKzVas). His work focuses on the social epidemiology and prevention of chronic diseases and their major risk factors. He has published 124 international peer reviewed articles and has led 14 studies as PI and CoPI raising over 3,2 million € in competitive national and international research and training bids. His methodological interests include the measurement of physical and social urban characteristics related to chronic diseases, the use of mixed methods and the conduction of participatory action research methods. He is very much interested in the dissemination of public health research participating in national and international television and radio programs and writing for newspapers and other social media. He writes an Urban Health column in El País, the most read newspaper in Spanish online in the world, https://elpais.com/salud-y-bienestar/la-salud-va-por-barrios/