Miss Emke Brazier

I am a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the School of Applied Sciences; specifically in Psychology. I joined LSBU as an undergraduate in 2015 and upon completing my undergraduate degree I completed my Masters of Research at the University of Sussex. I returned as an hourly paid lecturer in 2018 and then began working as a graduate teaching assistant in September 2021 teaching on a range of psychology modules on both undergraduate and post-graduate psychology courses.

My area of interest is addiction, originally focused on recreational illicit drug use due to the prolific and overt recreational drug use I witnessed within the school community as a young person. This transitioned into a focus on nicotine addiction and the motivations driving the use of e-cigarettes specifically. I am most interested in investigating these motivations in young non-smokers and also resistance to e-cigarettes in some adult smokers. I work within two research groups at LSBU, the first is the centre of addictive behaviour research which aims to understand addiction from a psychosocial perspective. The second group is a recently formed Nicotine and tobacco research group where myself and colleagues discuss current and future research ideas in the area of nicotine and tobacco. My contribution to this group focuses on e-cigarettes as a harm reduction tool for adult cigarette smokers whilst also identifying reasons the trial/use of e-cigarettes in young people has increased in recent years.
I am currently in the third year of my PhD which involves me applying a social norms framework to understanding decision-making regarding e-cigarette use in the populations mentioned above. Currently, I am in the process of using the findings from the beginning portion of my PhD to design, run and assess a brief intervention to reduce the intention to use e-cigarettes in young people. I will be using the findings from my study into adult smokers to look at the effect of manipulating things like product choice/flavour availability on the likelihood of purchasing/using an e-cigarette in adult smokers.
I have also worked previously with researchers from LSBU and UCL on differences between smokers' and non-smokers' attention to warning labels to investigate the effect of different health warning labels on e-cigarette packaging on attention in these groups.

Psychology