Research Fellow, Institute for Social Marketing and Health, University of Stirling. My research interests include household air pollution from biomass fuel smoke, second-hand tobacco smoke exposure and the use of low-cost PM sensors to measure ambient and indoor air quality.
Clean the Air Better Indoors for Newborns (CABIN): Reducing Exposure to Household Air Pollution During Pregnancy in Sub-Saharan Africa
With colleagues from across sub-Saharan Africa and the UK, I’ve been awarded an Academy for Medical Sciences GCRF Networking Grant to explore new strategies to reduce pregnant people’s exposure to biomass fuel smoke.
Recent publications
I’ve published across a range of topics in environmental and public health, principally on second-hand smoke and indoor air quality. Dobson R, Demou E, Semple S. Occupational Exposure to Second-Hand Smoke: Development of a Job Exposure Matrix. Ann Work Expo Heal 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/annweh/wxab019 Dobson R, Siddiqi K, Ferdous T, Ruque R, Lesosky M, Balmes J, Semple S. Diurnal variability of fine particulate pollution concentrations: data from 14 low and middle income countries....
Air pollution changes over the course of the day – how does that affect health?
This blog post originally appeared on the ISMH blog. It’s well understood that air pollution changes from place to place and day to day. News stories about bad air pollution in India or China are commonplace. Likewise, if you stand next to an old bus as it’s running, you have a very different experience to the top of Ben Nevis. But what about changes over the course of the day? It surely stands to reason that, if human behaviour affects outdoor air pollution (as it certainly does) then during times when humans are most active, such as the middle of the day, air pollution will be worse?...