Dr Richard Sharpe is currently working as an Advanced Public Health Specialist at Cornwall Council where he is responsible for leading the public health mental health and social prescribing programmes across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. In addition, he continues to supervise students working on a number of research projects from health and housing through to indoor air pollution and social prescribing. Richard also continues to lead on a range of health and housing projects including understanding the impact of fuel poverty interventions and a large whole house retrofit programme. He has an interest in whole system approaches to improving public health through housing.

As  an honorary member, Richard is working in collaboration with the Centre to develop a range of research projects influencing health outcomes.  For example, he has completed a collaborative fuel poverty project with Dr Ben Wheeler and Dr Tim Taylor which has recently been funded by the Eaga Charitable Trust. He is also the public health lead for the Centre’s Smartline project. This is a large collaborative research project that brings together researchers, organisations, and businesses to understand the different challenges people face linked to health and wellbeing, and people’s aspirations for using technology to help overcome them.

He has also worked on a project at the Centre to investigate physical activity in older adults. The project was in collaboration with an Expert Advisory Group to deliver three strands of work, including a qualitative review, systematic review of reviews and overarching synthesis. Other projects completed included an award winning Health and Housing project. This was a collaborative effort with business partner, Coastline Housing, to investigate factors contributing to air quality and poor health outcomes. This project used a multidisciplinary approach that employed epidemiological, molecular and asset management-based approaches to explore indoor air quality and risk of allergic diseases.

Richard also has an interest in environmental management. For example, he has set-up a water efficiency project in collaboration with South West Water. He conducted home surveys to assess the uptake of water conservation activities and assess whether water conservation strategies offered a sustainable approach to meeting the supply and demand balance and off-set future climate change risks, published in the Water and Environment Journal.