Notable Research Awards and Prizes

• Society for the Study of Addiction, Fred Yates Prize, 2020
• UK Society for Behavioural Medicine, Early Career Award, 2018
• Cancer Research UK, Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, 2017
• Welcome Trust, Public Engagement Prize, 2015
• BMJ, Best Research Paper of the Year Award, 2014
• NIHR Coordinating Centre for Research, Capacity Development Scholarship, 2011

Research Profile

I am Research Director for The Addiction and Mental Health Group (AIM). I currently hold a post-doctoral fellowship award from Cancer Research UK. My fellowship focuses on designing a smoking cessation intervention for people with depression/anxiety and testing the intervention in mental health settings (Improving Access to Psychological Services (IAPT)) in a randomised and controlled feasibility and pilot study. 

I am an epidemiologist and behavioural scientist. My work falls within the remits of clinical and health psychology, and public health, with a strong focus on applied research. My research uses epidemiological methods to find and explore intervention targets, and then interpret the results using behavioural and psychological theory for use in mental health and addiction treatment settings. 

I completed my PhD in epidemiology at The University of Birmingham on the topic of smoking and mental health.  I continued on to post-doctoral position projects at the University of Bristol working across the MRC's Integrative Epidemiology Unit, and the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group until 2018.

PhD and DClinPsych Supervision

I am happy to supervise PhD and DClinPsych projects in these areas:

Methodologies:

• Systematic reviews and meta-analyses 
• Observational/cohort studies
• Secondary analyses (i.e., randomised controlled trials, Clinical Practice Research Database) 
• Advanced epidemiological techniques (i.e., propensity score matching, instrumental variable analyses, causal inference)
• Feasibility and pilot randomised controlled trials
• Randomised designs

Topics:

• Tobacco smoking and mental health
• Tobacco smoking treatment and epidemiology
• Mental health treatment and epidemiology
• Addiction treatment and epidemiology
• Dual treatment of addiction and mental health
• Projects based in primary care services
• Projects based in Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services
• Depression and anxiety disorders
• Behaviour change

I currently teach on the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (DClinPsy), MSc in Clinical Psychology, and MRes in Psychology programmes.