Dr Shirlene Oh has been awarded an Honorary Degree in recognition of her transformative role in healthcare.
Shirlene has been instrumental in the healthcare sector, including shifting the focus from disease prevention and sickness management to health creation and community wellness.
Shirlene is Chief Strategy and Population Health Officer at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Executive Lead for its New Hospital programme. The project aims to build the world’s first net-zero, digitally intelligent hospital.
Within her work, Shirlene looks at the social determinants that can affect people’s health and collaborates with many different stakeholders across areas related to wellbeing, such as urban planning, biodiversity and local skills development.
Shirlene’s career began with physical chemistry, and after an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, she undertook a PhD at the University of Durham, which explored the formation of potentially cancer-causing free radicals because of a chemical used to preserve meat.
She then joined Glaxo SmithKline, initially working on the development of HIV drugs and eventually became Vice-President of its new Sustainable Health Lab.
Shirlene is well-known in the Department of Health Studies at Royal Holloway, where she has shared her experience with students and given her time to projects such as the University’s Social Science Impact Accelerator.
