Lion Shahab

about

Professor of Health Psychology Behavioural Science and Health Institute of Epidemiology & Health Research summary

Current research interests and projects focus on:

• Smoking-related biomarkers

- impact of biomarker feedback on cognitive antecedents of behaviour change

- feasibility of using biomarker feedback to motivate cessation

• Smoking-related diseases

- detection of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases at population level

- inter-relationship between disease diagnosis and smoking status

• Tobacco product regulation

- evaluation of smoke constituent testing regimes

- level of exposure of smokers of different tobacco products to carcinogens

- association between tobacco product design and smoke exposure

• Tobacco control policy

- evaluation of legislative changes on use of nicotine replacement therapy

- assessment of attitudes in the general population towards new tobacco control strategies

• Novel smoking cessation interventions

- development and testing of pharmacological and behavioural treatment for smoking cessation

- systematic meta-analytic evaluation of novel interventions

• Smoking and mental health

- association of happiness with smoking and smoking cessation

- changes in mental health (anxiety, depression) as a function of changes in smoking status

• Miscellaneous

- evaluation of smoking-related health education in the medical profession

- early changes in synaptic transmission and plasticity in Alzheimer's Disease

- classification of Behaviour Change Techniques (BCTs) in health behaviour interventions

Research activities involve a variety of techniques/methods used in both human (randomised controlled trials, epidemiological analysis, laboratory/experimental work) and animal studies (electrophysiology).

Teaching summary

I'm the programme lead for the UCL MSc Health Psychology course. This taught course (around 50 students per year) seeks to educate and help students become well-rounded research practitioners with the majority of our post-graduates going on to higher research degrees or employment in the wider health sector. External as well as internal teaching encompasses a variety of topics focusing both on methodological as well as research content (meta-analyses, epidemiology, tobacco control). I'm also involved in supervising MSc as well as PhD students.