Professor Fiona Fylan

Fiona is a Health Psychologist who applies behavioural sciences to better understand behaviour and to develop and evaluate interventions to change behaviour. She works in areas such as energy use, transport choices, road user behaviour and healthcare provision.

Fiona leads the Sustainable Behaviour team within the Leeds Sustainability Institute. This explores a wide range of behaviours that encourage healthy people and places. Examples include:

• Understanding how people respond to initiatives to change the energy they use such as retrofitting energy efficiency measures to their homes and switching their domestic fuel from natural gas to hydrogen. The insight gained can be applied to develop communication resources that enable people to make informed choices about their energy, and to avoid misperceptions and misunderstandings that could lead people rejecting new processes and technologies.
• Developing interventions to encourage safer and more sustainable road user behaviour, e.g. to increase active travel, to reduce aggressive or inconsiderate driving, to reduce air pollution by reducing short car journeys.
• Identifying why interventions to change behaviour are unsuccessful, and what can be done to improve them. For example why people do not follow advice to reduce damp in their homes, and how the advice needs to change so that people understand, support, and follow it.
• Understanding how to change the physical or social environment to increase the uptake of health-promoting opportunities, such as cycling and walking, attending for screening tests, and increasing individual and system resilience.