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The link between alcohol and health has been a particular theme of my research interests. This has included comparative studies of liver cirrhosis trends across Europe which brought into focus a major increase in Scotland and the rest of the UK in the 2000s. This work was influential in getting the Scottish government to develop a comprehensive alcohol strategy. My main focus over the past 30 years been on Russia. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union male life expectancy fell to 57 years in 1994. Between 2002 and 2010, together with colleagues at LSHTM and in Russia, I led a Wellcome Trust funded case-control study on alcohol and mortality. This established for the first time a key role for hazardous drinking as a major explanation for high working age male mortality there. Between 2014 and 2020 I ran the International Project on Cardiovascular Disease in Russia (IPCDR) involving collaborations with over 50 scientists from Russia, the UK, Germany and Norway. This project was funded by the Wellcome Trust and various sources in Norway. Because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 l have now stopped working with people in Russia. This is because all of my collaborations there involved Russian state institutions and in my view it is not right to engage with them while Russia is carrying out a completely unjustifiable war against Ukraine and its population.

My current research includes work on excess mortality during the COVID pandemic, understanding negative trends in mortality and life expectancy in the UK since 2010, developing a critique of the Global Burden of Disease study and contributing to the IHCoR study that is working on improving diagnosis and treatment of hypertension in rural Africa.