Michele works in the area of evidence synthesis within the Informing Healthy Public Policy programme. She has extensive experience of systematic reviews and guideline development. Her PhD research, supervised by Laurence Moore, Peter Craig, and Hilary Thomson, relates to systematic reviews of natural experiments. Prior to taking up an MRC Doctoral Studentship at SPHSU in 2014, Michele worked as a programme manager and information scientist in the NHS for ten years. Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, she moved from her native Canada to the UK in 2003.

Her projects with SIGN and Healthcare Improvement Scotland included eleven national clinical guidelines, European collaborations on cancer guidelines and rare diseases, evidence synthesis in support of the national cancer quality indicator programme, implementation of HIV standards, national standards for nutritional care, standards for the care of older people, and quality indicators for hepatitis C.

In 2012 she earned a Master of Public Health with Distinction from the University of Glasgow, winning the Mackinlay Prize and the public health departmental prize for best research project. In 2016-17 she won a European Respiratory Society Fellowship in Guidelines Methodology and undertook three months of training in Cochrane systematic review methods at the Iberoamerican Cochrane Centre, Barcelona, followed by three months of further training in evidence synthesis at NICE in Manchester.

She is a member of the GRADE Working Group, the Cochrane Statistical Methods and Information Retrieval groups, and the European Respiratory Society Cough Taskforce.

Research Interests: systematic review methods, regression discontinuity designs, critical appraisal, assessment and synthesis of non-randomised studies, guideline development, evidence informed policy, public health, breast cancer (prevention, risk prediction, screening), prevention of alcohol-related harms, fifth wave public health, healthcare improvement.

Expertise:  Systematic reviews, critical appraisal of RCTs and non-randomised studies, synthesis of natural experiments, regression discontinuity, guideline development, GRADE summary of findings, quality standards and indicators, literature searching, qualitative methods.