Marcus Munafo

Marcus Munafò is Professor of Biological Psychology and MRC Investigator at the University of Bristol, where he leads a programme of research into health behaviours and their impact on physical and mental health within the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (https://www.bristol.ac.uk/integrative-epidemiology/). He co-directs – with Angela Attwood and Olivia Maynard – the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group (https://www.bristol.ac.uk/psychology/research/brain/targ/), which uses epidemiological methods to identify putative causal pathways between health behaviours and disease outcomes, and laboratory methods to interrogate the underlying mechanisms of these pathways. Using genetically-informed causal inference methods, they have shown that smoking is a causal risk factor for adverse mental health outcomes, and that the association between vaping and smoking in young people may be due to a common underlying factor, such as risk taking personality. He has a long standing influence in the factors that contribute to research quality, and in 2019 co-founded the UK Reproducibility Network (https://www.ukrn.org).