Theresa Marteau
Dame Theresa Mary Marteau, DBE, FMedSci, FAcSS (born 7 March 1953) is a British health psychologist and professor who leads the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. She is also a fellow and director of studies for Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
Theresa Marteau studied social psychology at the London School of Economics (BSc), earned an MSc in abnormal/clinical psychology at the University of Oxford, and completed a PhD in health psychology at the University of London. Her PhD thesis was on perceptions of diabetes in childhood.
Her career began as a lecturer in health psychology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in 1986, then a senior lecturer in 1993, and later a professor at King’s College London. In 2010 she moved to Cambridge.
Her early research looked at how giving people personalized risk information about preventable diseases affected their behavior, but the results were not clear. She then focused on developing and testing interventions that work through non-conscious processes rather than conscious decision making. Marteau was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2001. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017.
Her work argues that government policies should include population-level interventions as well as those targeting individuals, helping to put the idea of “nudges” into practice. She has led the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health and explored how the environment shapes behavior.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 06:05 (CET).