Biography
Dr Elaine Toomey is a Lecturer in the School of Allied Health in the University of Limerick. She is also a Health Research Board 'Applying Research into Policy and Practice' Research Fellow. She is a Cochrane Ireland Research Associate and a member of both the Health Research Institute (University of Limerick) and the Health Behaviour Change Research Group (National University of Ireland Galway). Elaine is a Chartered Physiotherapist and obtained her PhD from University College Dublin (2016) and her MSc and BSc from the University of Limerick (2012, 2010). 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 complex behaviour change childhood obesity prevention intervention, with a specific focus on process and implementation outcomes. 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 has two main strands - 1) utilising health behaviour change for chronic disease prevention and management, and 2) enhancing the methods used for the implementation of health research into policy and practice. She has specific methodological expertise in evidence synthesis, implementation science/knowledge translation, process evaluation and fidelity/adaptation of 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 60 peer-reviewed journal publications as well as numerous blogposts and alternative research outputs and has secured over 3.7million in national and international research funding as Principal Investigator or co-applicant/collaborator.
Research Interests
Health behaviour change for chronic disease prevention and management.Implementation science/knowledge translation and informed decision-making in health policy and practice.
Health research methods, e.g. evidence synthesis, fidelity and adaptation of complex behavioural interventions, process evaluations, and behavioural intervention development and evaluation.
Open science and health research transparency, stakeholder involvement and citizen science.
Professional Activities
Award
- 2020 - UK Society for Behavioural Medicine Early Career Award
- 2020 - Applying Research into Policy and Practice Fellowship (249,518.92)
- 2020 - European Health Psychology Society Stan Maes Early Career Award
- 2020 - European Young Researcher Award (finalist)
- 2017 - James M. Flaherty Early Career Research Award (7200)
- 2016 - Leamer-Rosenthal Emerging Researcher Prize for Open Social Science ($10,000)
- 2015 - Early Career Researcher Travel Award
- 2014 - Early Career Researcher Travel Award
- 2013 - Early Career Researcher Travel Award
- 2009 - HRB Summer Student Scholarship
Association
- Member, Irish Society of Chartered Physiotherapists
- Co-Chair, European Health Psychology Society Open Science Special Interest Group