Angus Thomson is Principal and Senior Social Scientist at Irimi, a behavioural design organisation. He is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, and Adjunct Clinical Professor, Department of Communication Studies & Global Health Communication Center, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, USA. He has developed a global program of research, development and implementation into adherence to vaccination and public engagement. Through collaborations with experts in the social, behavioural and communication sciences, the team has developed a suite of instruments to understand & measure attitudes to vaccination, and is currently developing and testing a Vaccine Confidence Toolkit for Healthcare Professionals.
He proposed a new framework for vaccination advocacy(1) which identified the need for more interdisciplinary collaboration(2), more evidence, and engagement in the public conversation, and he is now trying to put this into evidence-based practice. Having developed the 5As taxonomy of determinants(3) of vaccination uptake, he has run national multi-stakeholder projects in Europe, Africa and Latin America that aim to improve vaccination uptake.
He has published 15 peer-reviewed opinion pieces, research papers, and book chapters on vaccination acceptance and coverage, and is also a regular reviewer for peer-reviewed journals such as the BMJ, Science Translational Medicine, Plos One, PIDJ and Vaccine. He also lectures on Vaccination Perception at the Institute Pasteur.
1. A. Thomson, M. Watson. Listen, understand, engage. Sci. Transl. Med. 4, 138ed6 (2012)
2. H. Larson, J. Leask, S. Aggett, N. Sevdalis, A. Thomson. A Multidisciplinary Research Agenda for Understanding Vaccine-Related Decisions. Vaccines 2013, 1, 293-304
3. Thomson A, Robinson K, Vallée-Tourangeau G. (2015) The 5As: A practical taxonomy for the determinants of vaccination uptake. Vaccine. 34;1018-1024.
4. Bahk C, Cumming M, Paushter L, Madoff L, Thomson A, Brownstein J. (2015) A real-time online platform to monitor the public conversation on vaccination in mainstream and social media. Health Affairs. 35(2):341-7.
5. Thomson A, Watson M. (2016) Vaccine hesitancy: a vade mecum v1.0. Vaccine. 34;1989-1992.
6. Wheelock A, Miraldo M, Thomson A, Vincent C, Sevdalis N. Evaluating the importance of policy amenable factors in explaining influenza vaccination: a cross-sectional multinational study. BMJ Open. 2017 12;7:e014668.
