Annette O'Connor

Dr Annette O'Connor is a quantitative epidemiologist who works in food production, public health, food safety, and animal uses for food, companionship, and biomedical research.  She conducts primary research and synthesis research in these areas. This work involves combining research in transparent and comprehensive ways that ensure maximum value is obtained from society's investment in research funding.  She has worked in a diverse set of fields, including food-borne pathogens of animal proteins, statistical approaches to antibiotic resistance data, food production, biomedical uses of animals, and veterinary public health. The main aim of her work is to help end-users better understand the results of research so decision makers such as industry bodies, veterinary practitioners, and government officials can incorporate primary research into decisions, i.e., science-supported decision making. She is also particularly interested in reproducible research, study design, assessing the bias of observational studies. Her work on study design and risk-of-bias assessment is closely related to toxicology because much of the toxicology data relates to experimental studies assessing toxins or observational studies assessing associations with human or animal health states. She has over 150 publications on topics as diverse as primary research, study design, systematic reviews,  and meta-analysis.