Team Leads

Ann McNeill King’s College London UK Peter Shields Ohio State University, US

Countries involved

UK, US, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Pakistan, New Zealand, and collaborating across Brazil, Germany, Russia

The Idea

The IC-PIECE team hopes to address a major barrier to e-cigarette research: the need for additional rigorous, multidisciplinary studies to generate high quality international data sets. By establishing necessary research tools and sustainable infrastructure, including a novel tracking app to develop an international cohort of people with different vaping and smoking histories, they plan to investigate the population impact of e-cigarettes – from their use in smoking cessation to health outcomes and even their influence on climate and the economy.

Different countries vary widely in their response to e-cigarettes, from outright bans to encouraging their use for smoking cessation. This ambitious team plans to collaborate across 10 countries with divergent approaches to e-cigarette regulation – which will be key when assessing their impact on different societies. With expertise ranging from tobacco control and addiction to behaviour and public health, IC-PIECE hopes to support world-wide population health by better informing the global regulation of these devices.