Nana Opoku

Nana joined the then Public Health Institute (now part of the School of Public and Allied Health) in 2023, after a two-decade-long career as a Public Health Physician. Shaped by a deep commitment to addressing health inequities, particularly in underserved communities, both domestically and internationally, Nana’s work has predominantly been around inclusion health. She has worked in diverse healthcare settings ranging from low-resourced rural community centres in Africa to large urban public and private health settings in the UK. Almost half of her career life was spent working at the intersection of public health, migrant health, and international health protection as a panel physician.

Throughout her career, she has championed sustainable public health interventions that are community-driven, culturally relevant, and evidence-based. Following that passion, she worked in public health departments in Greater Manchester and in the voluntary sector for 5 years before moving to academia. Among her duties then was managing stakeholders' engagement activities linked to commissioned portfolios—specifically communicable disease control, cancer, and sexual health- to ensure they were inclusive and had input from seldom-heard-from communities.

Currently, Nana leads the Master's International Health and Development module and the undergraduate Environmental/Health Protection module. She also teaches a range of subjects within the School of Public and Allied Health, specializing in community engagement, migrant health, globalization, and communicable disease control. She has successfully supervised dissertations at the undergraduate and master's level as well as PhD projects.

Outside the classroom, Nana is a strong advocate for universal healthcare access and social justice. She is a member of the EDI SIG ( Inclusion health subgroup) of the Faculty of Public Health, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health, and is involved in work done by a few charitable organizations in the UK that support health access for internationally displaced populations, the homeless, and racially and linguistically minoritised populations. These affiliations enhance her critical understanding of public health in practice and evolve the way she teaches various subjects in class.

Her research interests are in health systems/ workforce development in low-resource settings, migrant health, and ethnic/racial/gendered disparities in healthcare experience.