Rachel Barry is a Research Fellow within the Centre for 21st Century Public Health, where she leads its Academy for ECRs and contributes to research coordination efforts across its diverse research projects. She is the Vice President of ICARA, an international research network focused on building capacity and addressing the dearth in evidence on the commercial determinants of health in low-and-middle-income countries. Rachel also sits on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committees at departmental and university level.

Rachel's research focuses on the regulation and political influence of diverse health-harming industries, concentrating principally on issues related to coordination and coherence. She predominately works on cannabis, leading the development of a distinctive and highly influential series of papers on emerging regulatory frameworks for cannabis policy and their implications for health and nascent industry. Furthermore, she was sole author on two studies exploring coordination challenges and the constraints imposed by broader regional and international drug and finance agreements in the development of Uruguay’s cannabis regulation.

Rachel led the development and authorship of the first two comparative studies on the institutional and organisational barriers to implement measures to minimise tobacco industry interference across four UK Overseas Territories and five LMICs, published as part of a special issue for Tobacco Control. Recently, she has expanded her research profile to include other health-harming industries such as pesticides, ultra-processed foods and fossil fuels.

Rachel's work has stimulated extensive academic and policy discussions on the health implications of commercial cannabis markets, and informed public health policy at a range of levels from national to local. Her comparative analysis of state-level cannabis policymaking informed several follow-up studies, including guidelines for reducing health harms of cannabis, an assessment of policy options for cannabis reform in New Zealand and a comparative analysis of the efficacy of US state-level cannabis policies. Her work has also received significant media coverage and she has been interviewed by several high-profile news outlets, including Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vice News, Los Angeles Times, Air Talk and Healthline.

Several key institutions and decision-making bodies have drawn on Rachel's published research, including the Royal College of Physicians, American College of Physicians, US National Association of County and City Health Officials and the Massachusetts Prevention Alliance. This work also led to invitations to contribute to key policy initiatives via roles that reflect the significance and policy influence of her published research, including as commissioned policy advisor for Health Canada’s Cannabis Regulation and Legalization Secretariat and advisory committee member on California Governor Newsom’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy