Professor Sube Banerjee

Responsibilities

Professor Sube Banerjee is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Sube has executive responsibility for the Faculty and is a member of the University Executive Board. The Faculty has four Schools: Health Sciences, Life Sciences, Medicine, and Veterinary Medicine and Science. As Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Sube provides executive leadership to the Faculty ensuring strategic and operational outcomes are set and met. As a member of the University Executive Board he contributes to and shares ownership of key decisions, jointly leading the development and implementation of university strategy and policy.

Profile

Sube is an old age psychiatrist and an applied health researcher. He trained in medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and in psychiatry at Guy’s and the Maudsley hospitals and the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. He has an MBA from the London Business School. His research focusses on improving quality of life and quality of care for those with dementia and the evaluation of new treatments and services. He also works nationally and internationally on strategy and policy development to improve care for people with dementia and older adults with complex needs. He served as the Department of Health’s senior professional advisor on dementia leading the development of the National Dementia Strategy for England. Subsequently he worked with the World Health Organisation promoting dementia as a global priority in its Global Action Plan. He built and led effective modern services for older people’s mental health and dementia in London and has held, local, regional, and national clinical leadership roles. Clinically he practices as an old age psychiatrist leading a national memory service for people living with HIV. Prior to joining the university in 2023 Sube was for four years the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Health at the University of Plymouth, leading its six health schools. Before that he was Associate Dean for Strategy and Deputy Dean at Brighton and Sussex Medical School and Professor of Mental Health and Ageing at King’s College London. He has been awarded national and international awards for policy and research in dementia.  Sube is a Trustee of Alzheimer’s Society, a Non-Executive Director of Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, and an elected member of the Executive of the Medical Schools Council.

Teaching and Research Summary

Sube’s research focusses on improving quality of life and quality of care for those with dementia and the evaluation of new treatments and services. Working in dementia research has allowed him to collaborate broadly across professional and disciplinary boundaries and with basic and applied research teams. He specialises in applied health research including the design and conduct of complex multicentre RCTs. Sube is interested in the formulation of health and social care policy and how this can be informed by the findings of empirical research and insights from clinical practice. Throughout his career he has pursued research questions concerning ethnicity and health and other sources of inequality and inequity in older adults with a focus on dementia and depression in the UK and in emerging economies. He currently leads the £4.7m ESRC/NIHR funded DETERMIND programme which is investigating in a unique cohort study inequalities and inequities in dementia care and outcomes in those newly diagnosed with dementia. He also holds current grants funded by EPSRC, NIHR, Canadian Institute for Health Research, US Alzheimer’s Association, Brain Canada, and US National Institutes of Health. In education he directs the £4.2m HEE/NHSE funded Time for Dementia programme, this CATE award-winning initiative makes a compelling case for the future not just being more of the same, but more, different, and better. In this, now a compulsory part of the curriculum for 6,000 healthcare students across the south of England, pairs of students visit a person with dementia in their homes every three months for two years. Its evaluation showed it creates compassion, person-centredness, and enables students to see health systems from the viewpoint of patients rather than staff. It empowers students to have hope and higher expectations for the frail and makes them better agents for change. Sube is an NIHR Senior Investigator and co-director of the NIHR Dementia and Neurodegeneration Policy Research Unit.