DrCharlotteVrinten

Summary

Charlotte is a Research Associate in the Department of Primary Care and Public Health at the School of Public Health, which she joined in 2021.  She currently works on e-cigarette uptake by youth in the UK.  Harnessing secondary longitudinal data, she examines the pathways into and out of e-cigarette use and aims to identify subgroups of adolescents for whom e-cigarette use may act as a gateway to subsequent tobacco smoking. 

Charlotte also works on the Go-Golborne project, a whole-systems, community-based pilot intervention that ran between 2016 and 2019 and aimed to prevent childhood obesity in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.  Charlotte supports the evaluation and data analysis of this intervention, in close collaboration with the local authority.

She collaborated with Imperial's Patient Experience Research Centre on public responses to COVID early in the pandemic, showing that the ability to comply and adopt certain infection control measures, such as self-isolation, was lower among those who are most socioeconomically disadvantaged in society.

Before joining the School of Public Health, she worked as a Research Associate on the Rare2030 project at Imperial College Business School, which she joined in 2019.  The aim of the Rare2030 project, which was co-funded by the European Union Pilot Projects and Preparatory Actions Programme, was to propose policy recommendations to guide future European policy on rare diseases by using a participatory foresight approach and additional innovative consensus building methods.  As part of this project, Charlotte examined the R&D pipeline and market launch of orphan drugs.  

Charlotte completed her PhD in Medicine on n-of-one trials for rare diseases at VU University in Amsterdam in 2018, using rare neuromuscular diseases as a case study.  Her dissertation examined the contribution that n-of-one trials can make to the creation of an evidence base for treatments for patients with rare diseases.  In addition to conducting two clinical trials using the n-of-one methodology, she also examined the acceptability of evidence from series of n-of-one trials to healthcare regulators and HTA agencies (i.e. the Dutch National Health Care Institute and the Dutch national competent authority for market approval of medicines, the Medicines Evaluation Board).

Before joining Imperial College, Charlotte worked as a Research Psychologist at the Department of Behavioural Science and Health, University College London, from 2012-2019, where she examined the prevalence and sociodemographic distribution of cancer fear in the general population and its association with uptake of cancer screening.  Between 2010 and 2012, she worked as a junior researcher at the Department of Clinical Genetics of VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 

Charlotte holds degrees in Medicine (PhD), Psychology (BSc), and Philosophy (BA) and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).  Her professional interests include Public Health, health policy, non-communicable diseases, public attitudes to public health advice, and rare diseases. She is Chair of the organising committee of the UK Public Health Science conference (http://www.ukpublichealthscience.org/), which she organises in collaboration with The Lancet.

Follow Charlotte on Twitter.   Follow the UK Public Health Science conference on Twitter.

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