Supervisor(s)

Jean Adams, Louise Foley, David Ogilvie, Jenna Panter

Programme

Population Health Interventions

Summary

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 — digital, economic, 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 as part of our new PHOENIX study. 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.

*For a more detailed outline of this sub-topic, please see the project Rethinking evidence synthesis for public health on the CAM-DTP website.

If you are interested in this topic, please review the information for prospective PhD students on the PHI group web page and the PHOENIX study webpage and then make a pre-application enquiry to David Ogilvie in the first instance.