Dr Elaine Toomey

Dr Elaine Toomey is a Lecturer in Evidence-Based Healthcare and Programme Co-Director and Co-Founder of the new MSc in Evidence-Based Future Healthcare in the University of Galway. She is the Academic Co-Lead for Trials Innovation within the Institute for Clinical Trials. She is also a Health Research Board ‘Applying Research into Policy and Practice’ Research Fellow and PI on the INTREPiD project which looks at integrating research into public-health decision-making. Until April 2020, Elaine was Associate Director of Cochrane Ireland within Evidence Synthesis Ireland and led the implementation of the Evidence Synthesis Ireland Fellowship Scheme. Previously, Elaine was a Health Research Board (HRB) Interdisciplinary Capacity Enhancement Post-doctoral Research Fellow (2016-2019), where she co-led the development of a feasibility trial of a complex behaviour change childhood obesity prevention intervention, with a specific focus on process and implementation outcomes. Her PhD research focused on addressing intervention fidelity within complex behavioural trials. Elaine was a Visiting Researcher at Hunter New England Population Health Service/Newcastle University (Newcastle, Australia) in 2018, the Centre for Studies in Family Medicine in Western University (Ontario, Canada) in 2018, and the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (Ontario, Canada) in 2017 and 2018.

Elaine’s research aims to improve population health and wellbeing by enhancing the implementation of research into policy and practice using insights from behavioural and implementation science. She has specific methodological expertise in evidence synthesis, implementation science/knowledge translation, process evaluation and fidelity/adaptation within trials of complex behaviour change interventions. In 2016 Elaine was awarded a Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for Open Social Science for Emerging Researchers from the University of California Berkeley for her work in fidelity and transparency of behaviour change interventions. She is also a Catalyst for the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), a member of the Health Research Board Open Research National Steering Committee and a keen advocate for open science. She is a recipient of the Irish Canadian University Foundation James M. Flaherty Early Career Scholarship (2017), the UK Society for Behavioural Medicine Early Career Award (2020), the European Health Psychology Stan Maes Early Career Award (2020) and a Euroscience European Young Researcher Award (EYRA) finalist (2020). She has published over 80 peer-reviewed journal publications as well as numerous blogposts and alternative research outputs and has secured over €7 million in national and international research funding as Principal Investigator or Co-applicant/Collaborator.