Dr Ali Khashan

Ali Khashan is a Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology, School of Public Health, UCC and a Principal Investigator in the INFANT Centre, UCC. Since January 2023, Ali is  the SPHeRE Co-Director in UCC.

Research Interests

Ali is interested in research on determinants of maternal and neonatal adverse pregnancy outcomes and the impact of foetal and early life environment on short- and long-term health of the child. He is also interested in the impact of the pregnancy environment and pregnancy complications on the maternal long-term health.

Ali has almost 15 years research experience in Perinatal and Psychiatric Epidemiology with specific expertise in interrogation of complex and large population-based datasets and advanced statistical methods. He has a global network of collaborations in the UK, Denmark Sweden, USA and New Zealand.

Ali’s team has produced a series of original and highly cited research papers in high impact journals including PLoS Medicine, JAMA Psychiatry and the International Journal of Epidemiology, which collectively explore in detail causal associations between perinatal risk factors, such as in-utero exposure to stress, alcohol and Caesarean section and later child and adult morbidity. In addition, he has led a series of papers on the impact of pregnancy complications on maternal long-term health.

In the past five years, Ali’s research expanded towards perinatal digital health in low-income settings. He led the development of the ULTRA App with Dr Simon Woodworth in UCC and Professor Chris Redman of COLAB (https://pregnancycolab.tghn.org/current-projects/). This App is currently being tested in healthcare settings in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania in collaboration with Professor Blandina Mmbaga of Kilimanjaro Clinical Research Institute (KCRI).

In January 2023, he became