Dr Sharon Cox is a Principal Research Fellow within the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group at University College London. Collectively, she has over 15 years’ experience within substance use treatment and research. Her research focuses on tobacco dependence and cessation amongst people living with severe, and often unchanging, health and social needs. She has a special interest in tobacco harm reduction, specifically investigating how quitting smoking using non-combustible nicotine products can improve health outcomes and quality of life in people experiencing homelessness and those with other drug dependences.

Dr Brose is a Reader in the Nicotine Research Group at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London. Her research, mainly in the areas of vaping and smoking and mental health, is highly cited and has national and international impact on policy and practice. Dr Brose is also the Programme Lead for the MSc Addictions and Associate Editor for Addiction and SRNT’s journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research. She is the chair of the local organising committee for the 2021 SRNT-E conference, which will be held in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dr Sarah Jackson is a Principal Research Fellow within the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group at University College London. Her work focuses on monitoring population trends in smoking behaviour and evaluating the effectiveness of smoking cessation aids and interventions on an individual and population level. She has extensive research experience, with over 150 publications. She has received awards from the Society for the Study of Addiction in recognition of her outstanding contribution to research and practice in the addictions field and to tobacco control policy. She sits on Action on Smoking and Health’s advisory council and is a Senior Editor at the journal Addiction.

Ute Mons is a University Professor of Cardiovascular Epidemiology of Aging at the University of Cologne, Germany. She holds an M.A. in Sociology and Economics, and a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health from the University of Heidelberg. She has co-authored more than 100 research publications, mostly in her main research areas tobacco control, cancer prevention, and chronic disease epidemiology. In these areas, Ute Mons is involved in several national and international research projects, including being PI of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (ITC) Germany project. Ute Mons also participates in several national committees to promote public health and tobacco control. In 2017, she was awarded one of the ECL ECTOH Young Professional Awards recognizing her contribution to tobacco control.

Dr Bar Zeev is a Public Health Physician and Behavioural Scientist. She is a Senior Lecturer (Tenure Track) at the Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has extensive research experience, with over $1.78M in grants, and over 70 publications. Her research focuses on understanding influences on tobacco use and improving smoking cessation outcomes in disadvantaged populations, and specifically among pregnant women. In the last few years, she has filled leadership roles in the field of Tobacco control in Israel, as the Chair of the Israel Medical Association for Smoking Cessation and Prevention. Together with a strong Tobacco Control Coalition, she has advocated successfully for extensive tobacco control legislation that went into effect in 2020 and included an advertisement ban, a point-of-sale display ban and plain packaging, effective for all tobacco and nicotine products. 

Floor van den Brand is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Family Medicine at Maastricht University. Her research interest lies in behavioral and policy interventions for stimulating smoking cessation in individuals with a lower socioeconomic position. She conducts research on implementing smoking cessation group trainings with financial incentives targeting people with a lower socioeconomic position and is studying the effects of a tobacco sales ban in supermarkets on youth and adults from disadvantaged neighborhoods.  

Olivia Maynard is a Co-Director of the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group (TARG) at the University of Bristol. She leads a programme of research examining how best to design nicotine and tobacco messaging and warning labels. She is also interested in harm reduction, perceptions of risk and misperceptions surrounding these products. Her research on standardised packaging of tobacco products has been used to inform policy debates worldwide. She is an Associate Editor for Nicotine and Tobacco Research and Addiction. 

Professor Munafò’s research focuses on understanding pathways into, and the consequences of, health behaviours and mental health, with a particular focus on tobacco and alcohol use. This work incudes: 1) observational and genetic epidemiology, and the use of a range of methods that enable stronger causal inference from observational data, such as negative control and Mendelian randomization methods; 2) the laboratory study of cognitive and neurobiological mechanistic pathways that underpin exposure-outcome relationships; and 3) the development of novel individual- and population-level interventions that target these mechanisms, including choice architecture interventions. This work has informed ongoing policy debates, such as the introduction of standardised (“plain”) packaging for tobacco products. He also has interests in the role of incentive structures in science, and the extent to which these shape the robustness and reproducibility of scientific research.