Season 2, Episode 9: Triangulating The Truth: Strengthening Causal Inference in Epidemiology with Professor Deborah Lawlor
In this episode of the Emerging Scholar Podcast, we sit down with an absolute legend in the research field, Professor Deborah Lawlor. Deborah is a Professor of Epidemiology and the British Heart Foundation Chair at the University of Bristol, based in the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit—and is constantly working to tackle one of the central challenges in modern epidemiology: how to strengthen causal inference. As a trained physician whose work spans life course epidemiology, maternal and perinatal health, and cardio-metabolic disease, Lawlor has spent her career developing approaches that push research beyond association toward credible explanations of cause.
Our conversation centres on her landmark 2016 paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology - Triangulation and Ideological Epidemiology, co-authored with Kate Tilling and George Davey Smith, which outlines the framework for triangulation in etiological epidemiology. When studies with different—and ideally unrelated—sources of bias converge, confidence in causality increases; when they diverge, assumptions must be re-examined. Through examples ranging from breastfeeding comparisons and maternal BMI analyses using Mendelian randomization to debates in cardiovascular disease and the “It’s the Mother, It’s the Mother” challenge in life course research, Lawlor shows what rigorous triangulation looks like in practice.
This is a deep, wide-ranging conversation about intellectual honesty, methodological creativity, and what it truly means to design studies that test—not just confirm—our beliefs about causality. If you care about how we generate credible evidence in population health, this is an episode that needs to be listened to, and returned to over and over again.
Papers & Resources That We Touched On In This Episode:
- Professor Deborah Lawlor University Of Bristol Bio
- The association between components of adult height and Type II diabetes and insulin resistance: British Women's Heart and Health Study
- Socioeconomic position in childhood and adulthood and insulin resistance: cross sectional survey using data from British women's heart and health study
- The main paper for our discussion today: Triangulation in Aetiological Epidemiology
- Mentor and Colleague: Professor George Davey Smith
- Dr. Shah Ebrahim: The future of NCD Epidemiology (methods or matter)?
- Effect of age on decisions about the numbers of embryos to transfer in assisted conception: a prospective study
- Association of Assisted Reproductive Technology With Offspring Growth and Adiposity From Infancy to Early Adulthood
- 'Mendelian randomization': can genetic epidemiology contribute to understanding environmental determinants of disease?
- What are the causal effects of breastfeeding on IQ, obesity and blood pressure? Evidence from comparing high-income with middle-income cohorts
- Integrating multiple lines of evidence to assess the effects of maternal BMI on pregnancy and perinatal outcomes
- It's the mother!: How assumptions about the causal primacy of maternal effects influence research on the developmental origins of health and disease
- Clinical effect of naturally random allocation to lower systolic blood pressure beginning before the development of hypertension
- Elucidating the role of maternal environmental exposures on offspring health and disease using two-sample Mendelian randomization
Guests
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Professor Deborah Lawlor
Professor Deborah Lawlor, CBE, FMedSci is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Bristol and an NIHR Emeritus Senior Investigator. She was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to social and community medicine research and, in 2024, received the prestigious Richard Doll Prize for outstanding contributions to epidemiology.
A globally renowned epidemiologist and translational research leader, Professor Lawlor’s work has shaped international thinking on life course and reproductive epidemiology. Her research examines how biological — including genetic — social and environmental exposures across the life course influence disease risk, with a particular focus on perinatal, reproductive and cardio-metabolic health. She is especially known for advancing understanding of how a woman’s reproductive health affects her later cardiovascular risk and that of her children and grandchildren.
She leads a major program within the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit and has been a central figure for more than 15 years in Children of the 90s, including pioneering inter-generational follow-up studies. She also leads the Perinatal and Reproductive Health theme within the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre and contributes to major cohort studies such as Born in Bradford, tracking health across generations. Named among the world’s most influential scientific minds, she has published hundreds of papers and developed widely used clinical tools, including IVFpredict, an online calculator used by more than 80,000 individuals to estimate the likelihood of live birth following IVF treatment.