Nicola Lindson

Health behaviours researcher

In 2008 I saw an advertisement for PhD studentships at a new research centre that would be investigating issues around tobacco control and stopping smoking. As a child I witnessed my mother’s struggles to quit smoking and so this has always been a topic I feel passionately about and it ignited my interest in helping people out of an addiction that was incredibly difficult to quit, despite their desire to do so. I am pleased to say I was successful in getting a studentship and following being awarded my PhD by the University of Birmingham I continued to work in research focused on helping people to quit tobacco smoking. In 2013 I began working in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford and I have been there ever since. My current work focuses on looking at the use of e-cigarettes and pharmacotherapies to help people to stop smoking, the benefits of quitting smoking on health, and helping people of lower socioeconomic status to quit. One of the things I really enjoy about my job is communicating my research findings to a wide range of people, and as part of this goal myself and my colleagues produce a podcast called Let’s Talk E-cigarettes, hosted by the University of Oxford, where we discuss the most up-to-date evidence on using e-cigarettes to stop smoking.