Research Opportunities

A population approach to disease prevention aims to shift the distributions of risk factors such as diet, physical activity and adiposity by changing the environments — economic, digital, physical and social — that influence everyone’s behaviour. To inform the next generation of environmental and policy strategies to prevent non-communicable diseases, we need to better understand the ways in which these interventions work, or could work, and the extent to which these are transferable between populations and contexts. This implies a need to improve our causal understanding of the disease prevention pathways linking a variety of environmental exposures via more proximal behavioural or metabolic outcomes to a variety of clinical outcomes.  

Our research programme offers the scope for a variety of PhD projects using the methods of epidemiology, natural experimental evaluation, qualitative causal process observation or evidence synthesis, singly or in combination, to investigate the mechanisms by which interventions can more effectively and equitably shift population dietary and physical activity patterns. Potential lines of inquiry include:   
•    Mechanism-focused systematic reviews of potential intervention strategies, e.g. using EBM+ or similar methods  
•    Epidemiological analyses to clarify causal pathways for interventions and novel intervention targets in the food or transport environments  
•    Investigating causal mechanisms in intervention studies in the food or transport environments.
•    Interactions between food and activity environment exposures 
•    Using routinely available georeferenced data on environmental changes and linking with well characterised cohorts to conduct statistical and spatial analyses

Supervisor(s): Jean Adams, Louise Foley, David Ogilvie, Jenna Panter, Martin White  

Programme: Population Health Interventions  

Our group works to enable health research in diseases, communities and settings where evidence to enable prevention, treatment and management of devasting burdens to health are woefully lacking. Our research sets out to understand how research methods, processes, skills and implementation could happen better, and be locally-led, in the most underserved regions across the globe. Our approaches are typically participatory, mixed-methods action research. This could be exploring health research study design, or how to work with the community to tackle perceptions about research and how to overcome these.

We work with health research teams and health workers across Africa, Asia and Latin America and work together to look closely at the challenges they are experiencing in the design, set-up, operational delivery and reporting of their research. We seek to work with them to identify better methods and approaches. We work in delivering skills training and capacity development and we also use digital technology and want to use advances in machine learning to drive equity in access to knowledge so that researchers, wherever they are, have access to the same quality and volume of training and resources.

Undertaking a DPhil with us could involve clinical trial design, or the application of AI in healthcare. It could have a social science or health economic component. Our DPhil projects always involve working in partnership with our collaborators in the Global South, and therefore travel and capturing data in those settings would be very likely. All our research is about tackling the inequity about where health research happens, who leads and who benefits from the data.