As a Research and Administrative Assistant, I researched for, wrote, and updated pages on the TobaccoTactics.org website, such as Michel Poirier and McKinsey, increasing their online traffic.

For example, I monitored the Tobacco Industry’s tactics of interference in policy against smoking and selling products, specifically the top four tobacco companies: Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, and Japan Tobacco International. This developed the technical aspects of writing for a Mediawiki platform, including reference coding, which uses a simple programming language. To find out information, I used advanced Google searches, WayBack Machine, Truth Tobacco Industry Documents and INURL’s searches on companies’ websites to find any links between people and organisations.

I also attended and undertook the role of secretary during the weekly TobaccoTactics team meetings, taking minutes, creating meeting agendas and distributing the meeting minutes to relevant people. Within my role, I performed office-based admin tasks, such as cataloguing journals and books, coordinating, planning and facilitating meetings, and managing the schedule of team meetings via email and Teams.

I volunteered to help out with other collaborative research projects within the group, such as collecting data for a taxonomy.

I was lucky to attend the event management meetings for the Qualitative Methods Forum at the University of Bath, which furthered my knowledge of qualitative methods being used in contemporary research. I helped to organise the Qualitative Research Symposium at the University of Bath in January 2019, and as a result, I attended the Qualitative Methods Workshop and the Qualitative Research Symposium. I was responsible for facilitating registration and coordinating speaker presentations.

During my placement, the team underwent a couple of days of media training hosted by two BBC journalists, which helped us understand how to prepare and behave in front of the camera during interviews.

Before my placement began, I attended a week-long course conducted by the Tobacco Control Research Group back in June 2018. This gave me the knowledge to understand why it was important to create/update TobaccoTactics web pages. It helps researchers and stakeholders understand the links to any conflicts of interest that a person or organisation might have.