Sarah-Anne is a Health Geographer who, since PhD graduation (2007), has worked continuously in research orientated roles with University of the Highlands and Islands. She is Professor of Rural Health and Acting Head of the UHI Division of Rural Health and Wellbeing.

She has research expertise in rural health and wellbeing and the use of participatory, qualitative methods. She has worked on several, large-scale international projects and has been PI or Co-I on over 20 externally funded projects.

Her work focuses on the relationships between rural place and health. She has particular interests in: i) community engagement and co-production in rural health services and ii) the role of the outdoors and natural landscape in the promotion of health and wellbeing. Research work has included exploration of rural mental health and rural social prescribing.

Sarah-Anne led UHI's contribution to the Interreg VA cross-border mPower project - which tested social prescribing and digital health interventions in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland. Sarah-Anne is currently leading a CSO-funded evaluation of community link workers in Highland. She is also Co-I on AHRC-funded work on culture and heritage on prescription. Since 2019, Sarah-Anne has also been working with NHS Highland on a person-centred redesign of respiratory pathways in Highland, funded though the Scottish Government TEC Pathfinder Programme.  

Previous projects as PI have included leading the UHI research elements of a large-AHRC grant on community participation and leading a Scottish Government funded, qualitative evaluation of NHS primary care redesign (which took a longitudinal approach over three years).

Sarah-Anne has been researching the relationships between landscape, nature and wellbeing since 2007. Her review of children’s use of the outdoors was one of the first publications on this topic and is highly cited. It has been downloaded over 3,000 times from Public Health England and is widely quoted outside academia.

She has co-authored guidance on the evaluation of health interventions in the outdoors and been awarded participatory research projects (as PI) funded by AHRC on the role of hospital grounds in the promotion of health and wellbeing.

Her work draws on theory from health geography, particularly relating to the spatialities of wellbeing, assemblage theory and therapeutic landscape. She has combined this with the use of qualitative GIS in two projects led by colleagues at Swinburn University (including an ARC Discovery grant).

Sarah-Anne has published in some of the highest-ranking journals in her field, such as Social Science and Medicine and Health and Place. She has recently co-edited a book on rural mental health which was published by Routledge.

Sarah-Anne is programme leader for the UHI Mres in Rural Health.

In 2021, Sarah-Anne was awarded a Professorship in Rural Health by the University of the Highlands and Islands in recognition of her international reputation in rural health research.