The Principal Investigators
Jean Golding, Emeritus Professor of Paediatric & Perinatal Epidemiology
Jean has been at the University of Bristol since 1980, firstly analysing data from the 1970 British National Birth Cohort. During the 1980s she was responsible for assisting in designing and augmenting a major perinatal survey in Jamaica 1985-6, and developed, and was the founder/Director of ALSPAC. She has continued to carry out research on the ALSPAC resource long into official retirement.
About Jean Golding
Abigail Fraser, Professor of Epidemiology
Abi’s work focuses on the life course epidemiology of women’s reproductive health and its relationship with chronic disease risk in later life, with a particular interest in the relationship between pregnancy complications (e.g., pre-eclampsia, preterm delivery, fetal growth restriction and gestational diabetes) and later cardiometabolic health in both mothers and their offspring.
About Abigail Fraser
Yasmin Iles-Caven, Senior Research Associate
Having worked with Jean Golding since the early 1980s, Yaz was involved with ALSPAC from the onset. Her interests include Locus of Control (LOC), non-genetic inheritance and beliefs and associated behaviours, particularly the interplay between LOC and beliefs and behaviours and whether these impact on risky sexual behaviour such as early sexual debut, along with sexual regret.
About Yaz Iles-Caven
Carol Joinson, Professor of Developmental Psychology
Carol has worked with ALSPAC since 2004 and brings expertise in developmental psychology and the epidemiology of mental health problems to the project. She feels that this project provides an exciting opportunity to increase the understanding of factors that influence the risk of developing mental health problems across the life-course. Research interests include: risk factors for the development of psychopathology in childhood and adolescence; epidemiology of depression with a focus on explaining why gender differences in depression emerge during adolescence; bidirectional relationships between mental health problems, stress and continence problems across the life course.
About Carol Joinson
Kate Northstone, Professor in Epidemiology & Medical Statistics
Kate has several research interests – a past focus has been on nutrition, and she has also published with experts in the fields of vision, asthma, and allergy. She is currently developing her interest in the science of running, maintaining, and collecting the best data from cohort studies. She has worked with ALSPAC for over 25 years and is currently Executive Director for Data. Kate provides oversight of all data provision and subsequent statistical analyses for this project.
About Kate Northstone
Dr. Matthew Suderman, Senior Lecturer in Epigenetic Epidemiology
Recent studies have shown that many exposures are encoded in the methylation levels of blood DNA including cigarette smoke, age, trauma, diet, stress, and socio-economic position. Matt’s goal is to characterize the associations between blood DNA methylation levels and a wide variety of exposures throughout life, particularly early exposures and those later exposures that appear to mitigate the health outcomes of early exposures. These characterizations may then suggest more targeted experiments to develop DNA methylation-based assays to help piece together exposure histories in order to identify high-risk individuals, to select interventions likely to improve health, and to monitor the effectiveness of ongoing interventions.
About Matthew Suderman
The Researchers
Lucy Beasant
Lucy Beasant is a Senior Research Associate at Bristol Medical School, Centre for Academic Child Health. She has a background in psychology, drawing upon qualitative methodologies, and has extensive experience of interviewing adults, parents, young people, children and health professionals, face-to-face and via remote techniques. She has an interest in mental health research, equipoise, ethical issues relating to consent and assent, and providing recruitment training for those delivering complex behavioural and surgical RCTs. Over the last 5 years she has been involved in conducting and delivering embedded qualitative methodology in several successful NIHR RCTs and RfPBs. Lucy is conducting qualitative interviews with ALSPAC participants to explore coping beliefs and behaviours, and their relationship with health and well-being.
Iain Bickerstaff
Iain started his career working on BCS70 and CHES data before working on a variety of medical, educational and child welfare data projects at various UK establishments. He joined ALSPAC in 1992 and held a variety of roles including Research Data Manager and Data Support Manager supervising the cleaning, availability and cataloguing of ALSPAC data. Whilst in the role of Data Support Manager he represented ALSPAC on the MRC Research Data Gateway project. In 2014 he joined the Study Team for Early Life Asthma Research (STELAR) working on a multi-cohort eLab project to facilitate cutting edge Asthma research. He was a member of the CLOSER Discovery technical advisory group between 2015 and 2019 as part of the MRC/CLS Cohort and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resource (CLOSER). He took his current role in 2019 bringing with him many years of experience in data management, metadata and ‘Big Data’ projects.
Contact: I.Bickerstaffe@bristol.ac.uk
Neil Goulding
Neil graduated with a PhD in Mathematics at Cardiff University. He has been working at the University of Bristol since 2012, initially working as a mathematical and statistical modeler in the Schools of Earth Sciences and Geography, and joined the Bristol Medical School in 2017, modelling stimulant use from wastewater data, alongside other epidemiological data sources. More recently, as a member of the Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU), he worked on projects using metabolomics data in epidemiological studies to explore their causal role and/or ability to accurately predict risk in reproductive, perinatal or cardiometabolic health. Neil has joined the team to examine ways in which biomarkers from the proteome mediate or interact with religious and/or spiritual beliefs and associated behaviours and their impact on mental and physical health and well-being of participants from infancy to adulthood in ALSPAC.
Steven Gregory
Steve is a data manager at the University of Bristol, where he has worked since 2001 in various admin and data roles. He gained extensive experience in cleaning, editing and analysing large data sets within ALSPAC. Much of his work now involves creating data files in preparation for statistical analyses, many of which he carries out in collaboration with senior academics and research collaborators.
About Steven Gregory
Isaac Halstead
Isaac graduated with a PhD in Psychology from Royal Holloway, University of London. His previous work involved examining predictors of attitudes towards biotechnologies, as well as attitudes towards science in general. He has joined the team to examine the associations between beliefs and behaviours and both physical and mental health outcomes.
About Isaac Halstead
Daniel Major-Smith
Dan originally trained as an Evolutionary Anthropologist, interested in the evolution of cooperation, life-history theory and cultural evolution, and for his PhD conducted fieldwork with the Agta, a population of Filipino hunter-gatherers. Since 2016, he has worked at the University of Bristol, both within ALSPAC as a data wrangler/Data Pipeline Manager, and as a researcher using the ALSPAC resource to explore topics including: family structure and reproductive development, common mental disorders in adolescence and young adulthood using health record linkage data, and potential issues of selection bias in ALSPAC’s COVID-19 research. He is now a – somewhat accidental – epidemiologist, with additional interests in causal inference, methods for handling missing data, and combining his epidemiological and evolutionary/anthropological backgrounds to explore associations between health and behaviours and beliefs.
About Daniel Major-Smith
Jimmy Morgan
Jimmy graduated from Swansea University in 2020 in Applied Medical Sciences, after which he studied for a Master’s degree in Epidemiology at the University of Bristol. He started working on ALSPAC in 2021 as part of the beliefs, behaviours & health study. His main research interests are inter-generational effects, study bias, causal inference, and socioeconomic epidemiology.
About Jimmy Morgan
Hamid Reza Tohidi Nik
Hamid is an epidemiologist with a wide range of experience in various fields of public health and epidemiology. He received his PhD in epidemiology from Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS) in 2018. He was a lecturer at Gonabad Medical University (GMU) between 2010 and 2012 and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Kerman University of Medical Sciences from 2018 to 2021. In October 2021, he joined the University of Bristol as a Senior Research Associate to work on ALSPAC data to explore the impact of beliefs and behaviours on physical and mental health outcomes. His research interests include methodological issues, longitudinal studies, causal inference, cancer epidemiology, behavioural risk factors, and systematic review and meta-analysis.
Holly Tunstall
Holly completed an MSc in Psychological Research Methods at University of Lincoln where she researched the interaction between listening to music and wellbeing. During both her BSc and MSc Holly has conducted small research projects covering social, behavioural, cognitive and clinical psychology. These research projects developed her skills and understanding of statistical analysis. Through internships she also gained experience of cleaning large datasets concerning human-animal interaction. Holly joined us in September 2022 as a Data Preparation Assistant. Among other tasks she is preparing data sets for statistical analyses and running phenome and exposome scans.