Dr Gillian Pepper

Assistant Professor

School: Psychology

Dr Pepper is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department, within the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences. She is the Programme Director for the MSc in Health Psychology and the Health & Wellbeing Lead for the Urban Futures Interdisciplinary Research Theme. She is a member of the Healthy Living Lab, the Psychobiology of Stress and Wellbeing Group, the Hoarding Research Group and the Perception Evolution & Behaviour Lab (PEBL).

Before coming to Northumbria University, Dr Pepper studied as an undergraduate at the University of Liverpool, where she won an Interdisciplinary Bridging Award to support her undergraduate research on morning sickness. She then went on to work in science policy and communication. She undertook work experience with the BBC Specialist Factual Unit (TV), and with BBC Focus Magazine. She worked for Newton’s Apple as a Policy and Project Manager, then as their Director, and for many years after that as a member of their board of Trustees. She spent 2 years working as a Communications Manager at the Department of Health, while she completed her MSc in Evolutionary Psychology at Brunel University. She was awarded a PhD in behavioural sciences from the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Newcastle University in 2015. She went on to work as a visiting postdoctoral scholar with the Newcastle City Council Public Health Team, then joined the Newcastle Institute of Health and Society, where she worked as a postdoc in the Health Psychology group with Vera Araujo-Soares. From 2016-2018, Dr Pepper worked with Daniel Nettle and Melissa Bateson, in their COMSTAR lab at Newcastle University.

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Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

Dr Pepper's research examines socioeconomic inequalities in health and wellbeing. She investigates how structural inequalities and features of human ecologies affect behaviours which, subsequently, affect health and longevity. As well as working on understanding the effects of exposure to adversity, she is particularly interested in the effects of perceived risk/safety on health behaviour. Much of her work has focussed, in collaboration with colleagues such as Prof Daniel Nettle, Dr Richard Brown, on the Uncontrollable Mortality Risk Hypothesis, and the Double Dividend of Safety. She also supports colleagues in their work on topics such as how adversity affects hoarding behaviour, and the effects of food insecurity on mind and metabolism.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
COVID-19: the relationship between perceptions of risk and behaviours during lockdown, Brown, R., Coventry, L., Pepper, G. 1 Apr 2023, In: Journal of Public Health
Telomeres as integrative markers of exposure to stress and adversity: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Pepper, G., Bateson, M., Nettle, D. Aug 2018, In: Royal Society Open Science
The behavioural constellation of deprivation: Causes and consequences, Pepper, G., Nettle, D. 11 Jan 2017, In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Cross-country relationships between life expectancy, intertemporal choice and age at first birth, Bulley, A., Pepper, G. Sep 2017, In: Evolution and Human Behavior
Out of control mortality matters: the effect of perceived uncontrollable mortality risk on a health-related decision, Pepper, G., Nettle, D. 26 Jun 2014, In: PeerJ

Professional Activity

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Examination: Breaking the Cycle of Socioeconomic Marginalisation: The Role of Welfare Policies and Societal Narratives in Shaping Psychological Well-Being among Low Income Groups 2025
Organising a conference, workshop, ...: European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association conference 2025 2025
Organising a conference, workshop, ...: International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health Annual Meeting 2024
Membership of committee: Urban Futures (External organisation) 2023
Membership of committee: School of Psychology (Organisational unit) 2021
Organising a conference, workshop, ...: International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health Annual Meeting 2021 2021
Examination: The Acoustic Discrimination and Recognition of Individual Heterospecifics by Humans: Proximate and Ultimate Causes 2020
Other: External PhD thesis co-supervision 2020
Examination: Fast-slow strategies in human populations. Applying insights from life history theory to explain patterns of interindividual variation 2018
Organising a conference, workshop, ...: International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health Annual Meeting 2018