About Us

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

Contact:  jean.golding@bristol.ac.uk

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

Contact:  Abigail.Fraser@bristol.ac.uk

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 behaviours and beliefs, particularly the interplay between LOC and RSBB, and whether these impact on risky sexual behaviour such as early sexual debut, along with sexual regret.

About Yaz Iles-Caven

Contact: cdylic@bristol.ac.uk

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

Contact: carol.joinson@bristol.ac.uk

Kate Northstone, Professor of 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

Contact:  Kate.Northstone@bristol.ac.uk

Matthew Suderman, Associate Professor in Molecular 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

Contact: matthew.suderman@bristol.ac.uk

The Researchers

Lucy Beasant, Senior Research Associate

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.

About: Dr Lucy Beasant – Our People

Contact:  Lucy.Beasant@bristol.ac.uk

Iain Bickerstaffe

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

Kimberley Burrows, Senior Research Associate in Health & Religious/Spiritual Beliefs and Behaviours

Kim completed her PhD in genetic epidemiology at the University of Bristol in 2015. She has since been at the Bristol Medical School working on projects within the omics space including studies using genetic, epigenetic and metabolomic data. More recently, Kim has been working on exploring the causal relationships between urinary incontinence and mental health in children and women. She has also explored the contribution of biological and life factors that may be on the causal pathway between early life adversity and later continence and bowel issues. Kim has joined the team to examine how factors such as religious and/or spiritual beliefs and resilience impact the relationships between adversity, stressful life events, and life-impacting diagnoses with later mental health outcomes.

About Dr Kimberley Burrows – Our People

Contact: Kimberley.Burrows@bristol.ac.uk

Neil Goulding, Senior Research Associate in Health & Religious/Spiritual Beliefs and Behaviours

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, before joining 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.

About Dr Neil Goulding – Our People

Contact:  N.Goulding@bristol.ac.uk

Steven Gregory, Data Manager

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

Contact:  steven.gregory@bristol.ac.uk

Isaac Halstead, Senior Research Associate in Health & Religious/Spiritual Beliefs and Behaviours

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 RSBB and both physical and mental health outcomes.  Isaac has recently secured a grant from SPARRC  (SCORE  Project for Advancing Research on Religion and Cooperation),  awarded via the Center for Research on Experimental Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at San Diego.  This grant looks at religiosity and pro-social behaviours.

About Isaac Halstead

Contact:  isaac.halstead@bristol.ac.uk

 

 

Jimmy Morgan, Research Associate in Health & Religious/Spiritual Beliefs and Behaviours

Jimmy graduated in Applied Medical Sciences at Swansea University in 2020 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 this programme. His main research interests are inter-generational effects, study bias, causal inference, and socioeconomic epidemiology.

About Jimmy Morgan

Contact: jimmy.morgan@bristol.ac.uk

Hamid Reza Tohidi Nik, Senior Research Associate in Health & Religious/Spiritual Beliefs and Behaviours

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 on this programme to work on ALSPAC data to explore the impact of RSBB on physical and mental health outcomes.  His research interests include methodological issues, longitudinal studies, causal inference, cancer epidemiology, behavioural risk factors, systematic reviews and meta-analysis.

About Dr Hamid Tohidi Nik – Our People

Contact:  re21901@bristol.ac.uk

Holly Tunstall, Research Associate in Health & Religious/Spiritual Beliefs and Behaviours

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, preparing data sets for statistical analyses and running.  From 1st October 2024, Holly was promoted to Research Associate, with research interests including Locus of Control and gambling.

About Miss Holly Tunstall – Our People

Contact:  holly.tunstall@bristol.ac.uk

Moving forward

Daniel Major-Smith, Senior Research Associate in Health & Religious/Spiritual Beliefs and Behaviours

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 beliefs and behaviours. From 1st October 2024, Dan has a new post at the Department of  Study of Religion at the University of Aarhus in Denmark  He is working on the “Gods, Games and the Socioecological Landscapes” project. He is still closely involved with the Bristol team.

About Daniel Major-Smith