Dr Laura Oakley
Associate Professor and Co-Programme Director - Distance Learning Epidemiology
United Kingdom
I am an epidemiologist focusing on maternal, reproductive and child health. My main interests are the epidemiology of infertility, ill-health during pregnancy and adverse perinatal outcomes, the effects of in-utero exposures on infant and child health, and infant feeding.
After an undergraduate degree in Sociology (London School of Economics) I spent several years working as a researcher on adolescent health at the Centre for Research in Primary Community Care, University of Hertfordshire. Following that, I completed a MSc in Epidemiology at LSHTM. My PhD, also completed at LSHTM, focused on the determinants of infertility in women and involved secondary analysis of two datasets. Between 2009 and 2014 I worked as a researcher at the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit (University of Oxford) on a number of projects relating to infant mortality, maternity care, and breastfeeding.
I hold an affiliated researcher position at the Centre for Fertility and Health (CeFH), Norwegian Institute of Public Health (Oslo, Norway).
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
Research
My research is focussed on using epidemiological methods to address key policy-relevant etiological questions relating to ill-health in pregnancy and fertility, using both interventional and observational designs, mainly but not exclusively in high-income countries.
Through my affiliation with CeFH in Norway, I have researched pressing issues in perinatal epidemiology using the exceptional national routine data linkages available. Since 2020 I have had a key role in a Scandinavian collaboration looking at Covid-19 and pregnancy (Nordforsk-funded SCOPE 1 and 2 projects) which has been at the forefront of addressing knowledge gaps about Covid-19 and pregnancy. I am a named collaborator on a Research Council of Norway funded programme of work looking at assisted conception and cancer risk, for which I am leading registry-based analyses.
I am involved in the British National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), currently co-leading the Reproductive Health working group for Natsal-4.
I am the lead epidemiologist for a programme of work on pregnancy in women living with sickle cell disease, and I was co-investigator for a recently completed NIHR-funded feasibility RCT assessing treatment options for this population.
I have a long-standing interest in the socio-economic determinants of breastfeeding in low-, middle- and high-income countries.