Peter Craig

Biography

Peter Craig co-leads the Informing Healthy Public Programme at SPHSU. He studied social policy at the Universities of Leeds and Bristol, and epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. Before joining the University of Glasgow in 2014, he worked for the UK and Scottish Governments as a researcher and research manager. From 2006-11 he combined this role with managing the MRC Population Health Sciences Research Network. He is the lead author of the MRC guidance on the development and evaluation of complex interventions, and on the use of natural experiments to evaluate population health interventions. Peter is the Unit's research lead on Knowledge Transfer and Exchange, a co-Director and leader of the evaluation workstream for What Works Scotland, and a member of the Cross-Whitehall Trials Advice Panel.

Research Interest

Peter works on the development and application of robust methods for the evaluation of policies that affect population health. He is particularly interested in the use of natural experimental approaches to evaluate interventions that cannot be tested in randomised trials, and in the use of evaluability assessments to inform decision-making about when and how to evaluate population health policies and other complex interventions. Current research includes studies of the effects of welfare reform on the health of lone parents in the UK, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver emergency medical products in resource-poor settings. Peter is also involved in work to develop guidance on the reporting of population health policy interventions, on how to take account of context in population health intervention research, and on the conduct of exploratory trials.