Full Blog:

Martina Lippi

Martina Lippi

University of Glasgow

PhD candidate

SSM member since: 2024

SSM participation: Member, attended and presented at the 2024 ASM in Glasgow

Topics of interest: Neurodiversity; Mental health; Employment trajectories

What inspired you to pursue a career in public health?

Coming from a business school background, my personal interest in studying neurodiversity in the workplace slowly branched out to public health without me even knowing. It is easy to see – and a lot of evidence exists on – how work can be a psychosocial determinant of mental health, but less easy to see how this plays out for a group that is usually characterized by high masking and currently at the centre of a lot of debates surrounding timing and access to diagnosis and support services. Using an interdisciplinary approach covering both Business and Management and Public Health I believe is the perfect pathway forward to contribute to these debates, positively reframing the role that employment and employment practices can have on neurodivergent people, especially ones that are just entering the world of work.

What excites you about working in research now?

Engaging with participants and all the new innovative ways of conducting research available at the moment. With this I do not only refer to qualitative creative methods such as photo-elicitation, that are definitely interesting and that feature in my thesis, but also the more exploratory-oriented quantitative methods. I see such potential for these methods to innovatively contribute to knowledge and I look forward to advancing my knowledge and research using some of them!

What area of social medicine/public health are you interested in?

Broadly speaking, my PhD research focuses on the social determinants of health, with particular attention to employment and mental health for disabled and neurodivergent people of working age. Particularly, I am interested in exploring the interplay between employment and mental health and the differences between neurodivergent people and other groups (e.g., other disabled and non-disabled), as well as the impact of certain policies in improving employment conditions and, as a result, disabled workers’ mental health. This also includes understanding the intersection of disability with other characteristics.

Can you tell us a bit about a project you’re working on now?

One of my current projects uses Understanding Society, a household longitudinal population study that focuses on trying to understand the experiences of the UK population, to assess the effectiveness of the UK Government’s “Improving lives: the future of work, health and disability” White Paper. As the aim of the White Paper is to both improve disabled individuals’ employment destinations and encourage positive mental health support by employers, it is important to understand whether solutions put forward are actually effective.

What do you hope this will lead to?

Hopefully this will lead us to understand what is working effectively or not in supporting disabled employment and mental health. This would potentially help to (re)direct policy intervention and broader discussions surrounding the topic, including elements that spread to the intersection with disability, such as social class.

Bonus question from ECR sub-committee: What unique challenges have you encountered in your specific area of social medicine/public health?

My unique challenges were related to the choice of data sources with enough – and specific – data that would allow me to focus on the neurodivergent population. I definitely struggled with identifying suitable data in the first year of my PhD because, even when data was available on the condition, it was often not enough to perform a complete analysis. I guess my suggestion is to stay determined and be creative. This is what I did and with less than a year to completion, I do have my datasets and my analyses!

SSM ECR features is a blog series that celebrates early career researchers. Each month we meet a member we admire, learn more about their work and find out what and who inspires them. To find out more visit blog or email ecr.ssm@gmail.com.