This is the next blog post of our “Spotlight on the Researcher” series and this week focuses on Professor Jackie Price. We have been chatting about her career, research interests and all things NESSIE.

Jackie is one of our co-leads and alongside Professor Alex Todhunter-Brown developed the idea of NESSIE. Jackie trained as a medical doctor before moving into research with a particular interest in how ill health occurs in populations (epidemiology) and how we can prevent this. Her own research involves setting up long-term studies to investigate molecular, genetic and environmental factors which help predict who is at high risk of ill health and how we might target such factors to prevent ill health from occurring. These types of ‘molecular epidemiology’ research studies were the idea behind UK Biobank which now holds anonymous genetic information from half a million UK participants for the purposes of further research and analysis.

Jackie is a strong advocate for making sure that treatment decisions are based on research evidence (evidence-based medicine). This led her to working with Cochrane, an organisation that specialises in using high-quality information to help make decisions about healthcare.  Jackie became co-lead for Cochrane Vascular (which produced systematic reviews on the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of vascular disease). Cochrane Vascular now forms part of Cochrane Heart, Stroke and Circulation which aims to share expertise and knowledge of evidence synthesis in cardiovascular disease recognising that these conditions are not only becoming more common within the global population but also that people are living with more than one condition as they age.  It was through Cochrane that Jackie met our other co-lead Alex Todhunter-Brown and the idea of NESSIE was formed!

Now that NESSIE is in its second year I asked Jackie for her thoughts on how the project was going and about future plans – Jackie highlighted that the first year of NESSIE was “all about consolidating the experience we’ve got and learning to work together. There is confidence in the work that we are producing as NIHR has just expanded the NESSIE team and of course there will be an opportunity to renew our contract in the future”.

Given the potential to get involved in future evidence synthesis projects, I asked Jackie for some advice for those interested in working in this area of research – “There is a massive amount of evidence synthesis going on and it’s easy to work remotely so look to see what is happening in the research areas you are interested in. Often projects will be offering both volunteer and paid opportunities”.

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Written by Professor Jackie Price & Dr Katie Thomson

Spotlight on researchers – Professor Jackie Price / NESSIE - NIHR Evidence Synthesis Scotland InitiativE by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0