Anna Gilmore is Professor of Public Health, Director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath. She is a public health physician, with an MSc (dist) and PhD in Public Health from LSHTM, is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health & holds an honorary clinic contract with Office of Health Improvement and Disparities. She has over 300 publications including over 160 peer reviewed publications. 

Her work focuses on three main areas:

• Understanding and addressing the commercial determinants of health. This includes development of models and taxonomies for understanding the ways the commercial sector impacts on health, including its influence on science and policy, and using such knowledge to identify appropriate public health interventions.
• The evaluation of complex interventions on health. This includes evaluation of the impacts of macroeconomic change on health and of public health policies or interventions. Such work includes examination of the impact of transition from communism to a market economy on health and evaluation of the impact of smokefree public places on health.
• Developing evidence for policy and using evidence to inform policy. Recent work includes that on tobacco industry pricing which has led to changes in tobacco tax in the UK.

She is a global leader in research on the commercial determinants of health, particularly in relation to the tobacco industry. Her research has been internationally recognised through awards including Public Health Advocacy Institute International Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents (2009) and WHO, World No Tobacco Day Medal (2008) for ‘outstanding contribution to tobacco control’. Early career researchers in her team have also received awards for their research including the World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH) Young Investigator Award and Public Health Science Conference Early Career Researcher Award.

She previously held a prestigious Health Foundation Clinician Scientist Award and led the Department of Health funded evaluation of smokefree legislation in England. The innovative methods her team developed for this project were then adapted to evaluate the impact of tobacco control mass media campaigns in work funded by the MRC. More recently her work has significantly advanced understanding of tobacco industry pricing and profitability and its implications for tobacco tax policy. This work prompted and was cited in government consultations, ultimately leading to changes in UK tobacco tax policy.

In 2011 her team launched www.TobaccoTactics.org, a ground-breaking knowledge-exchange platform now widely used by policymakers, civil servants, NGOs & the media globally. The model has been so successful, it is now being replicated in a series of tobacco industry observatories being established internationally by the FCTC Secretariat  Sites have so far been set up in Brazil and Sri Lanka in which we have played a supportive role.

Gilmore works closely with intergovernmental organisations notably the WHO, World Bank and FCTC Secretariat, national and international NGOs and policy makers, frequently provides evidence to parliamentary inquiries, ministerial and inter-ministerial meetings as well as working extensively with the press. Through these links her work has led to numerous impacts at national, European and global level.

She was senior editor and is now European editor for Tobacco Control, sits on numerous national and international expert committees including the Royal College of Physicians Tobacco Advisory Group; the International Expert Group on Article 5.3, the WHO Expert Committee convened to develop recommendations on how to address tobacco industry interference with tobacco control policy and the WHO International Expert Group on the Commercial Determinants of Health.