Speakers of the 12th Edition

Dr. Helen Brown is a behavioural scientist and epidemiologist with extensive experience applying behavioural science across healthcare, education, climate change, and social justice in the UK and beyond.

As UK Managing Director at BIT, Helen leads the organisation's UK practice, setting its strategic direction and overseeing the teams, partnerships and delivery behind its work. Her focus is on turning behavioural science into measurable social impact. In practice that means developing and rigorously evaluating interventions across health, education, climate and social justice, and building the client relationships and in-house capability that get evidence-based ideas adopted at scale.

Since joining BIT's in 2018, she has held a range of senior roles, most recently as Director of BIT UK's Health and Education teams, where she oversaw work to strengthen UK social policy, and before that as Director of International Programmes, leading an ambitious portfolio of projects across sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Under Helen's leadership, BIT's Health and Education teams launched BIT's flagship partnership with pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk — the Childhood Obesity Prevention Initiative, a global public-private partnership working with city governments, academic institutions, and non-profits to design and evaluate interventions tackling childhood obesity.

Her team also delivered the BITUP initiative, a large-scale randomised controlled trial across 108 secondary schools and over 100,000 pupils, which used simple text messages to tell parents how many school days their child had missed. The trial reduced absences and produced more than double the impact for pupils eligible for Free School Meals, with 76% of participating schools choosing to continue using the approach.

Helen holds a PhD in Public Health and Epidemiology from the University of Queensland, and spent more than five years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, specialising in Behavioural Epidemiology, before joining BIT.