Dr. Nicos Middleton
Dr. Nicos Middleton, BSc (UCL, 1997), MSc Health Care Decision Analysis (LSE and LSHTM, 1998), PhD Epidemiology (Dept Social & Community Medicine, now Dept Population Health Sciences, University of Bristol, 2004) is Associate Professor in Health Research Methodology and Biostatistics at the Department of Nursing, School of Health Sciences, Cyprus University of Technology. Previous affiliations include the Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol (Lecturer in Medical Statistics, 2004-2005), the Harvard School of Public Health (postdoctoral research fellow, 2006-2008) and the Cyprus International Institute for Environmental and Public Health (visiting Lecturer, 2006-2008).
At CUT, he teaches a range of research-orientated subjects: Research Methodology, Basic and Applied Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Evidence-based practice and Scientific Writing Skills, at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. He has supervised or co-supervised >30 doctoral and postgraduate students and young researchers. In 2024, he was awarded the first Excellence in Teaching award, a new scheme introduced by the University. He has served as Department Chair (2014-2016) and Dean of School of Health Sciences (2016, 2018-2020).
His core interests are on health inequalities, with a focus on socio-environmental and psychosocial determinants of health, as well as health services evaluation. Dr Middleton has led or participated as co-investigator in several research projects, funded by European or local agencies. To date, his track record includes >150 articles in peer-reviewed journals (GoogleScholar: >6000 citations, h-index=42, i10-index=93). Over the years, he has disseminated this work widely at major conferences, including the annual European Public Health conference and IEA World Congress of Epidemiology,
Since public health policy and practice are not well developed in Cyprus. Dr Middleton believes in the role of the academic community to advocate through formulating “policy-driven research” i.e. research for the purpose of driving policy, and thus, the need for increased integration of methodological approaches within a participatory action research and learning framework.
In the period 2015-2017, he was the Scientific Coordinator of the “BrEaST start in life” project (EEA Grants, 2014-2017) – a nationwide longitudinal study of mother-newborn dyads across all maternity clinics in Cyprus which provided first-time national breastfeeding indicators and explore the determinants of initiation, continuation and exclusivity of breastfeeding, including the adherence of maternity clinics to the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative 10 steps for successful breastfeeding. He is currently a member of the ad hoc Working Group of the National Breastfeeding Committee for the development for the assessment process of maternity clinics according to the WHO Baby-Friendly Initiative certification criteria (2021-)
He was PI of “Baby Buddy Forward” (Erasmus+, 2017-2021), a participatory action research project, which co-developed the Baby Buddy webapp with the active engagement of all local stakeholders, a purposeful multilingual digital platform for enhancing health literacy among various socio-cultural communities in Cyprus during the transition to parenthood. Soon after launch, Baby Buddy was awarded three awards: Cyprus Responsible Business Gold Award 2020 for “Prevention and Health”, Healthcare Business Bronze Award 2020 for “Contribution to health by civic society”, Cyprus Mother and Baby Award 2021 for “Best Information Service”.
The findings of the Baby Buddy project have led to two sequel projects under the Respectful Maternity Care framework, which he coordinated: “Baby Buddy Communicator” (Erasmus+, 2022-2024) on enhancing commination skills training of healthcare providers and “RESPECT” (CERV, 2022-2024) on shifting current practices around shared decision-making, informed choices and consent.
Dr Middleton is member of the International Epidemiological Association and the Society for Social Medicine (UK). During 2016-2020, he served as Government Representative in the Board of Directors of the Health Insurance Organization (responsible for the Cyprus healthcare system reforms-GeSY). He also represented the CUT School of Health Sciences in the Working Group for the Human Resources Planning (of the Capacity Master Plan, Ministry of Health (2022- ). He was a Founding member, Vice-President (2022-2024) and currently President elect of the Board of the newly established (2022) Cyprus Epidemiology and Public Health Association, national representative of Cyprus in the European Public Health Association and affiliated member of the International Epidemiological Association.