[5] She is also an associate editor for the Cochrane Public Health Review Group since 2008 and has a visiting Professorship at the Karolinska Institute.

[6] Whitehead was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to public health.

The current research programme that Margaret Whitehead leads focuses on the social dimensions of ill-health.

With international collaborators, her studies are looking at the ways in which health and social welfare systems themselves reduce or exacerbate the adverse consequences of ill-health and what can be done to improve the situation.

She is keenly involved in knowledge transfer: finding ways for research evidence to get to where it can be most useful in informing policy-making and public health practice.