The SSA Early Career Research Network team

Dr Inge Kersbergen is an SSA academic fellow in the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on social and environmental influences on health behaviour, particularly alcohol consumption. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Liverpool, where she investigated how visual attention to alcohol warning labels and advertising is associated with drinking behaviour. In her postdoctoral work, Inge examined how reductions to the serving size of alcohol and food can be used to decrease alcohol consumption and energy intake. During her fellowship, she is developing this line of work further to investigate how the packaging size of alcohol sold in shops influences drinking behaviour and how we may harness this effect to reduce alcohol consumption.

Nathan Critchlow is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Marketing and Health, University of Stirling. He specialises in analysing commercial determinants of health, the impact of marketing exposure on health-related attitudes and behaviours, and the regulation of marketing practice. His previous research includes analyses of price and market changes following the introduction of standardised tobacco packaging and minimum unit pricing for alcohol, national surveys of adolescent and young adult exposure to alcohol and food marketing, and research into digital marketing, sport sponsorship, advert design, and marketing regulation. His current work includes research into tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and food marketing. He is also on the board of directors at Alcohol Focus Scotland and was previously on secondment as a prevention researcher with the Cancer Policy Research Centre at Cancer Research UK.

Rob has worked in both addiction research and addiction treatment settings. His research has focused on how best to use online resources to disseminate research findings and on how to improve the use of evidence-based practice in addiction treatment settings. He has also worked on research into vaping in England, and primary care interventions for homeless people. Rob joined the SSA as deputy web-editor in November 2019.

Katie East is an SSA Griffith Edwards Academic Fellow at the National Addiction Centre, King’s College London. Her work focuses on understanding nicotine and tobacco product use and perceptions and how these can be changed through policy, with a focus on youth and young adults. Katie specialises in analysing population-level data in England, Canada, and internationally, and she co-leads the England arm of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project – the world’s largest tobacco policy evaluation programme (http://www.itcproject.org/). Her previous research has included understanding social norms towards smoking and vaping and their associations with regulatory environments and behaviours, and understanding the impact of specific policies (e.g., legal age of e-cigarette sale laws, flavour restrictions, warning labels, menthol cigarette bans) on vaping and smoking behaviours. She also researches public perceptions of ‘novel’ tobacco products, such as IQOS. Her work has been used as evidence in UK Parliament to inform e-cigarette regulations and she has written reports on the topic of vaping for the Department of Health and Social Care, the US FDA, and Health Canada. She is also the Operations Coordinator for the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT) Policy Research Network, which aims to undertake and better inform projects that address policy research in the field of nicotine and tobacco.

Dr Sophie Orton is an SSA academic fellow in the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on reducing the harm of smoking in pregnancy, including smoking cessation, nicotine replacement therapy and e-cigarette use in pregnancy. Her previous research also includes smoking in the postpartum; Sophie has a PhD in primary care from the University of Nottingham, during which she examined the prevalence and determinants of secondhand smoke exposure in newborn infants. She has previously held a research fellowship from the NIHR School for Primary Care Research, where she investigated postpartum smoking relapse prevention. Her SSA fellowship will focus on using nicotine replacement therapy for smoking reduction in pregnant women who have not been able to stop smoking completely.