Ailsa R Butler

I work in the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine on a Cochrane living systematic review of electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation and a Cochrane review of intervention for quitting vaping. Cochrane systematic reviews are recognised as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare, bringing together primary research data to facilitate evidence based choices about health interventions. In January 2025 the fifth update to the EC for smoking cessation review since it became a living review has been published. Our new Cochrane review of  interventions for quitting vaping was published in January 2025 can be found here. This work is carried out with the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group and is funded by Cancer Research UK. See our webpage for more information about our project. 

With the Health Behaviours team in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences I was the principal investigator on an ARC funded project to determine the important questions for future research in the field of weight management and obesity. Our priority setting project, Priorities for Obesity and Weight-related Research (POWER), followed the general steps set out by the James Lind Alliance. We aimed to gather and prioritise potential research questions via two online surveys and a workshop involving members of the public, researchers, healthcare and public health professionals, policy makers and the voluntary sector. The list of the research questions agreed upon is on our POWER webpage and in our paper.

I worked on a large evidence synthesis collating information from randomised controlled trials to  explore and evaluate the long-term outcomes of behavioural weight management programmes in terms of weight regain and associated health outcomes. This project was funded by the British Heart Foundation and the National Institute for Health Research Oxford Biomedical Research Centre.

I am involved in MSc supervision, teaching and marking.

My background is in epidemiology, infectious disease modelling and public health policy. I have a DPhil in epidemiology, my thesis explored childhood vaccination schedules and used data to validate the use of mathematical models in this process. I worked Parliament for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on HIV/AIDS, in this role I linked medical and epidemiological research and information and the views experiences of the voluntary sector to Parliamentarians. As a Post-Doc at Imperial College I worked on a project to explore the effect of a proposed link between injectable hormonal contraception and susceptibility to HIV acquisition. While at Imperial College I worked on systematic reviews on health behaviour linked to HIV spread and on time spent in different HIV stages.