Rachel works within the Tobacco Control Research Group as a Research Fellow for the SPECTRUM Research Consortium, a multi-university, multisectoral project focused on how corporations influence health and public policy, where she leads its work package on corporate conduct. She is also Vice President of the International Confederation on Alcohol, Tobacco and other Drug Research Societies (ICARA) and serves on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committees at university and departmental levels.

Rachel is internationally recognised for her research on cannabis regulation and its implications for health (and broader agendas such as crime and finance) and on cannabis and related industries. With expertise in questions around policy coherence and coordination, her work focuses on three main areas:

• Exploring the barriers and facilitators for developing coherent approaches to regulating the supply of unhealthy commodities and the conduct of companies that manufacture these products, notably cannabis, tobacco, alcohol and e-cigarettes.
• Understanding how complex systems of overlapping global, regional and national policies shape and constrain implementation of national health policy innovation.
• Developing evidence to inform innovation in cannabis governance by drawing on historical and contemporary lessons from regulating the global tobacco and alcohol industries.

This work has stimulated extensive policy and academic discussions on the health implications of commercial cannabis markets, as well as informed public health policy at a range of policy levels from national to local. Notably, Rachel served as an expert advisor to Health Canada’s Cannabis Legalization and Regulation Secretariat and the California Governor’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy in 2017 and 2014, respectively.

Prior to her current position, Rachel was a Research Associate in the Global Health Policy Unit at the University of Edinburgh, where she completed her PhD in International Global Health Policy. She was also a Research Assistant at the University of California, San Francisco’s Centre for Tobacco Control Research and Education.