Liina is presently working on ActEarly, a large UKPRP funded research project focusing on early life changes to improve the health and opportunities for children living in areas with high levels of child poverty, Bradford, West Yorkshire and Tower Hamlets, London. This work is in collaboration with the Bradford Institute for Health Research at Bradford Royal Infirmary.
Liina is leading the meta-evaluation of the program, developing core outcomes sets for ActEarly, and using quantitative methods to understand overall system change as a result of the ActEarly interventions.
She further contributes to Teaching and Learning on the MBBS Programme and supervises Masters students.
Before starting at the Hull York Medical School, Liina worked as a Research Fellow in the Department of Health Sciences at University of York. Previously, she has worked as a Child Growth and Development Research Fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children, and as a doctoral researcher and University Teacher at Loughborough University.
She obtained her PhD in Public Health Nutrition from Loughborough University in 2019, and her BSc and MSc(Res) in Anthropology from Durham University.
Liina's background is in the anthropology and human biology of growth, and her expertise are in:
- Child growth and development (e.g., inequalities, secular trends, nutritional status)
- Evaluation of early years public health interventions from a systems perspective (e.g., development of core outcome sets, consensus methods)
- Harnessing large longitudinal and routine datasets to address research questions related to growth and growth metrics (e.g., growth modelling using specialist software).
In her current role Liina has further started investigating ways to utilise connected routine datasets in systems evaluation.
Liina's wider research interests include investigating socioeconomic inequalities in child and adolescent health and growth globally using longitudinal cohort studies. The geographical focus of her work includes UK, the US and Guatemala. She has an interest in developing more sustainable and reciprocal research partnerships with low- and middle-income colleagues and has been awarded a British Academy and Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant to advance this work.
Liina is a peer-reviewer for several human biology, anthropology and nutrition journals.
Liina is currently teaching on the Phase I of the MBBS Programme.
Liina has active collaborations with colleagues at University of Loughborough, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and at the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children.
Associate Editor of Journal of Biosocial Science (2023-).