Team

Andrew Morris

Professor Andrew Morris has been the inaugural Director of Health Data Research UK since August 2017. HDR UK is the national Institute for health data science, with its mission is to unite the UK’s health data to enable discoveries that improve people’s lives.  He is seconded from his position as Professor of Medicine, and Vice Principal of Data Science at the University of Edinburgh.

Andrew was Chief Scientist at the Scottish Government Health Directorate (2012-2017).  Andrew currently chairs the Scottish COVID 19 Advisory Group which supports and provide analysis to the Scottish Government and senior clinical advisors.

He has published over 330 original papers, attracted over £100 million in grant funding and was the principal investigator of several programme grants including the Wellcome Trust United Kingdom Case Control Collection for Type 2 Diabetes, Generation Scotland, and the Wellcome Trust funded Scottish Health Informatics Programme (SHIP).

Trudie Lang

Global Research Director at Health Data Research (HDR) Global and Professor of Global Health Research at the University of Oxford and Head of The Global Health Network

Trudie Lang is Professor of Global Health Research; Head of The Global Health Network and Senior Research Scientist in Tropical Medicine, Nuffield Department of Medicine. She has over 20 years’ experience in running clinical trials, including trials in the developing world, for the pharmaceutical industry, the World Health Organisation and in academia.

Trudie focuses on combating diseases of poverty through the generation of high-quality evidence. She has worked in industry, academia and UN organisations. With her team and partners, she works to drive better health outcomes in vulnerable communities by enabling local leadership and ground-up implementation of high-quality health research studies.

Within the University of Oxford, she devised and leads The Global Health Network which is a major international collaborative enterprise that sets out to improve health by improving research.

Neil Postlethwaite

Neil Postlethwaite is Technology Director for the International COVID-19 Data Alliance and joined HDR UK in September of 2020.  He is responsible for ensuring successful product deliveries from all our technical alliance partners, including the Workbench, a trusted research environment that allows researchers to discover, access and analyse global datasets whilst respecting confidentiality and privacy.

Prior to joining HDR UK, Neil worked for 23 years at IBM where he held a variety of technical, management and executive positions, working across IBM’s Messaging and Integration middleware portfolio.  He has been responsible for deliveries of both IBM MQ and IBM Integration products across a myriad of platforms and release levels.  He was Director responsible for IBM’s acclaimed Watson Internet of Things Platform and worked extensively across the IoT ecosystem building strategic partnerships with silicon and device manufacturers and driving Open Standards.

Neil holds a degree in Electronic Engineering & Physics from Loughborough University.

Anne Wozencraft

Anne is Head of Partnerships at ICODA and is responsible for engagement with, and support for, the Alliance’s global partners. Prior to joining ICODA, she led the International Partnerships team at Cancer Research UK, where she developed the charity’s international strategy and expanded its partnerships in global research, policy and health.  Previously, Anne held a series of executive board roles at the British Council, the UK’s international cultural relations organisation, where she led global programmes in science, research and higher education, and was then acting Head of International Relations at Imperial College London.

Anne began her career as a research scientist and lecturer at King’s College London, specialising in the immunology of infectious diseases. She completed her PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and held a post-doctoral fellowship at Scripps Clinic, La Jolla.

Sarah Fullegar

Sarah Fullegar is the Communications Manager at ICODA.

Sarah joined HDR UK as an Executive Assistant in October 2020 and has over 15 years of experience working in the charity and not for profit sector.

Sarah holds a BA in Media with Cultural Studies from Southampton Solent University.

Matthew Retford

Matthew Retford is Technical Project Manager and Agile Scrum Master for the International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA). He joined HDR UK in May of 2021 and is responsible for the technical delivery and oversight of ICODA programmes and work-streams.

Matthew brings 5+ years of experience in the Health-Tech sectors in the UK and Australia. Prior to joining HDR UK Matthew was Lead Product Manager at Cera, the largest home care provider in the UK. His work at Cera focussed on the collection and analysis of health and operational data.

Matthew holds a degree in Computer Science from The University of Newcastle, Australia.

Sally Boylan

Sally is Project Manager and Grants and Agreements Coordinator within the ICODA team and supports 5 of the 10 Grand Challenges ICODA pilot projects on a day to day basis.

Previously, Sally worked at the Association of Charitable Foundations as Programme Manager for their Stronger Foundations initiative, a programme of inquiry into excellent foundation practice which took place over an 18 month period and which produced 5 thematic reports on Strategy and Governance, Transparency and Engagement, Funding Practices, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Learning and Evaluation. Prior to joining ACF, Sally worked as a freelance funding consultant for a number of years. Earlier in her career Sally led the institutional fundraising team at ActionAid and spent 11 years working for what is now the National Lottery Community Fund, managing a portfolio of funding programmes, and latterly leading a business change programme.

Edel McNamara

Data Protection and Information Governance Lead – Global

Jonas Häggström

Jonas is an experienced biostatistician with 20+ years of experience in the life science field.  Jonas is the Chair of ICODA Statistical Expert Group and VP of Global Health at Cytel.  In addition, he also serves as an expert statistical consultant to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and as an expert evaluator to the European Commissio.

Prior to joining Cytel Jonas has had positions in industry, academia, and non-profit organizations, and his previous appointments includes; Food and Agriculture Organization (UN organization), Genentech Inc, and AstraZenec.  At AstraZeneca Jonas was the Neuroscience Therapeutic Area Statistical Expert.  In that role Jonas lead and managed the department, provided input to drug development strategy and design across all phases, and was responsible for the statistical methodology.

Steve Kern

Steven E. Kern, PhD is Deputy Director of Quantitative Sciences at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  He leads a team of scientists focused on gaining insight from data coming from Gates Foundation investments to inform program strategies in global health.

The Quantitative Sciences group is focused on quantitative data analysis to support program strategies for therapeutic projects that the foundation funds.  This effort extends across all therapeutic areas in which the foundation is involved including maternal & child health, family planning, malaria, tuberculosis, neglected tropical diseases, HIV, and pandemic preparedness.  He and his team are strong advocates of making research data “always FAIR and sometimes OPEN” to improve the impact data can have towards the problem it was collected to address, and beyond.

Prior to this, he was Global Head of Pharmacology Modeling at Novartis Pharma AG based in Basel Switzerland where he led a team focused on providing model-based drug development support to therapeutics in many disease conditions across all stages of drug development.  He joined Novartis in 2010 from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah where he was Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics, Anesthesiology, and Bioengineering, and served as co-investigator for their NIH funded Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit.

He has designed, conducted, and served as a principal investigator for clinical pharmacology studies that spanned the population from preterm infants to elderly adults

David Sibbald

David is the CEO of Aridhia, which he founded with Professor Andrew Morris in 2008.  He is also the Co-Founder and Board member of Sumerian, an IT analytics company he founded in 2002 and was previously the Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Atlantech Technologies, a communications software company which he founded in 1992 and sold to Cisco Systems in March 2000.

David is the Founder and Trustee of the Kate MacAskill Foundation, a charitable organisation providing education, care and micro-enterprise funding for children and young adults in the developing world and is Chairman of the Johari Foundation. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from Glasgow University, Glasgow Caledonian University, the University of Paisley and the University of Strathclyde for services to Scottish science and philanthropy.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s National Academy of Science and Letters.  In the 2010 New Year Honours List, David was awarded an OBE for charitable services in Scotland and overseas.

Névine Zariffa

Névine Zariffa, MMath is a highly accomplished thought leader in the fields of biostatistics and data science with extensive experience across all phases of drug development.  Névine had a 25-year career in senior roles at GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca where she also led the Enterprise Data & Analytics initiative. She has been a key contributor to development strategies for over 200 drug projects across oncology, cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, inflammation, and renal diseases.  She served as a  Board member of CDISC for 6 years, has been a reviewer for The Lancet and has over 30 peer reviewed publications to her name.  She is currently a strategic consultant to select healthcare clients, several scientific data consortia (ICODA and ctMoniTR) and to the FDA’s Office of the Commissioner on the application of real-world evidence to COVID-19.

Aziz Sheikh

Aziz is a member of the Executive Leadership Team of ICODA and leads Driver Project 2.

Aziz Sheikh is Professor of Primary Care Research & Development, Director of the Usher Institute and Dean of Data at the University of Edinburgh.  He is a clinical epidemiologist with substantive interests in health policy, health informatics and the quality and safety of health care.  Aziz is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Quality in Health Care.  He is Director of the NIHR Global Respiratory Health Unit (RESPIRE), Director of the Health Data Research UK BREATHE Hub and co-Director of the NHS Digital Academy.

Aziz has been honoured with an OBE, fellowships from 9 learned societies and is the recipient of numerous national and international awards.

Prof Agnes Binagwaho

Professor Agnes Binagwaho co-chairs the Scientific & Strategic Advisory Council of the International  COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA).

Professor Agnes Binagwaho, MD, M(Ped), PhD is a Rwandan paediatrician who returned to Rwanda in July of 1996, two years after the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi.  Since then, she has provided clinical care in the public sector, served the Rwandan Health Sector (2001-2016) in high-level government positions, first as the Executive Secretary of Rwanda’s National AIDS Control Commission, then as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health, and 5 years as Minister of Health. She co-founded the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE), an initiative of Partners In Health, which focuses on changing how health care is delivered around the world by training global health professionals who strive to deliver more equitable, quality health services for all.

Professor Binagwaho currently resides in Rwanda and is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Global Health Equity.  She is specialised in emergency paediatrics, neonatology, and the treatment of HIV/AIDS. She completed her MD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and her MA in Paediatrics at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. She was also awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science from Dartmouth College and earned a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Rwanda College of Medicine.

Professor Binagwaho currently serves as a Senior Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organisation, and as a member of multiple Advisory Board and Board of Directors including the Rockefeller Foundation Board.  She is a member of a number of international working groups and task forces in global health for the United Nations and independent organizations and also sits on the Editorial Board of several scientific journals and serves on multiple scientific commissions.

Previously, she co-chaired the Millennium Development Goal Project Task Force on HIV/AIDS and Access to Essential Medicines for the Secretary-General of the United Nations under the leadership of Professor Jeffrey Sachs (MGGs). Professor Binagwaho also co-chaired the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS (JLICA) (2006–09) and founded the Rwandan Paediatric Society, chairing it until 2019. Since 2016, she has been a member of the American National Academy of Medicine and since 2017 a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.  In 2015, Professor Binagwaho received the annual Roux Prize and Ronald McDonald House Charities Award of Excellence.

She is currently a senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Professor of Paediatrics at UGHE, as well as an Adjunct Clinical Professor of Paediatrics at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. Professor Binagwaho’s academic engagements include research in implementation sciences, research on human rights to health, health services delivery systems strengthening, HIV/AIDS, and paediatric care. She has published over 190 peer- reviewed articles.

Dr Martin J Murphy

Martin J Murphy, DMedSc, PhD, FASCO  co-chairs the Scientific & Strategic Advisory Council of the International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA).

Martin J Murphy,  was Founding CEO and Board Director of the 20-year-old non-profit CEO Roundtable on Cancer at the request of the 41^st President George H.W. Bush. Marty was also Founding CEO of Project Data Sphere®, a non-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable devoted to cancer clinical trial data-sharing and analysis.  He is Founding Chief Executive Officer of the non-profit Shanghai TuoXin Health Promotion Center that has expanded its purview from cancer prevention and improving cancer patient outcomes to include international Covid-19 interventions and global pandemic preparedness.

Founding Executive Editor of the 26-year-old peer-reviewed journal, The Oncologist, Marty is also Founding Editor of Stem Cells, the 39-year-old flagship journal of stem cell biology, and Co-Founder of its 10-year-old sister journal, Stem Cells Translational Medicine reporting on stem cells in clinical trials.  In 2021 he became Director Emeritus of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer.

An NIH principal investigator, Marty has authored more than 180 primary peer-accepted papers and 7 books, is co-founder of Society for Translational Oncology, member of six Scientific Advisory Boards, two corporate boards of directors, Chairman Emeritus of Conquer Cancer—ASCO Foundation, and Steering Member of Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology. He is an Emeritus Member of National Cancer Policy Forum of National Academy of Medicine (US National Academy of Sciences), board member of Center for Public Health Advisory Board of the Milken Institute, Director Emeritus of Foundation for NIH, Fellow of American Society of Clinical Oncology, and former vice chairman of C-Change. Marty is married to Ann Murphy, PhD, president and founder of AlphaMed Press and co-founder and executive director of Society for Translational Oncology. They have five adult children and ten grandchildren.

Prof Frank Rockhold

Professor Frank Rockhold is a Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University Medical Centre, Affiliate Professor of Biostatistics at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Managing Partner of HunterRockhold, Inc. He has diverse research interests and consulting experience including trial design, data monitoring, benefit/risk, and pharmacovigilance and has been a leader in the scientific community in promoting data disclosure and transparency in clinical research. His career includes senior management positions in industry, most recently as Chief Safety Officer for GSK.  Dr Rockhold served as Chairman of CDISC and president of the Society for Clinical Trials. He also served on the initial PCORI Advisory Board and is currently on the boards of the Frontier Science Foundation and an advisor to EMA.

Frank holds a BA in Statistics from The University of Connecticut, an ScM in Biostatistics from The Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in Biostatistics from the Medical College of Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is an Elected Fellow of both the American Statistical Association, the Society for Clinical Trials, and the Royal Statistical Society.  He is an Accredited Professional Statistician, PStat®, and a Chartered Statistician, CStat.

Prof John Danesh

Professor John Danesh is Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine and Head of the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. Alongside his role as Research Director, he is also Director of the British Heart Foundation’s Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit, Associate Faculty Member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and Honorary Consultant at the Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Before receiving his MSc from the London School of Health and Tropical Medicine, he trained in medicine at the University of Otago in New Zealand and at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia. His main research interests are discovery genomics and cardiovascular genetics, therapeutic target prioritisation, international vascular health, screening and risk prediction, systems genomics and blood donor health and biology.

Prof Nicky Mulder

Professor Nicky Mulder heads the Computational Biology Division at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and is a full member of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine. She leads H3ABioNet, a large Pan African Bioinformatics Network of 28 institutions in 17 countries, which aims to develop bioinformatics capacity to enable genomic data analysis on the continent. H3ABioNet has developed an extensive training program for African researchers. She also co-leads a Sickle Cell Disease Data Coordinating Centre and a Wellcome Trust Centre Data Integration Platform at UCT.

She received her PhD in Medical Microbiology from the University of Cape Town and then worked for 8.5 years at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, as a Team Leader.

At UCT her research focuses on genetic determinants of susceptibility to disease, African genome variation, and microbial genomics and infectious diseases from both the host and pathogen perspectives. Her group provides bioinformatics services and training and develops new algorithms and resources for the analysis of complex African genetic data.  Prof Mulder is actively involved in capacity development, including training, education and curriculum development in Bioinformatics.  She also sits on a number of international scientific advisory boards.

Prof Steve Webb

Professor Steve Webb MBBS, MPH, PhD, FRACP, FCICM, FAAHMS

Dr Steve Webb is an ICU specialist at Royal Perth Hospital, a Professor of Critical Care Research at Monash University, and Deputy Chair of the Australian Clinical Trials Alliance.  He designs and conducts clinical trials that generate evidence to improve patient care. He is named as an investigator on more than $115 million in research funding, has been an investigator on trials with an accumulated sample size of more than 50,000 patients, and has published more than 180 manuscripts including in the NEJM (7), JAMA (5), and The Lancet (2). He has particular experience with Bayesian adaptive platform trials and other innovative designs such as cluster cross-over trials.

Prof Trudie Lang

Global Research Director at Health Data Research (HDR) Global and Professor of Global Health Research at the University of Oxford and Head of The Global Health Network

Trudie Lang is Professor of Global Health Research; Head of The Global Health Network and Senior Research Scientist in Tropical Medicine, Nuffield Department of Medicine. She has over 20 years’ experience in running clinical trials, including trials in the developing world, for the pharmaceutical industry, the World Health Organisation and in academia.

Trudie focuses on combating diseases of poverty through the generation of high-quality evidence. She has worked in industry, academia and UN organisations. With her team and partners, she works to drive better health outcomes in vulnerable communities by enabling local leadership and ground-up implementation of high-quality health research studies.

Within the University of Oxford, she devised and leads The Global Health Network which is a major international collaborative enterprise that sets out to improve health by improving research.

Prof Wang Yu

Wang Yu, MD, PhD, is the distinguished Professor of Wanke School of Public Health, Tsinghua University.  He served as Director General of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention for 13 years (2004-2017).  He is the president of the Chinese Foundation for Hepatitis Prevention and Control.

In the academic field, Dr Wang Yu was dedicated to research on hepatitis viruses and hepatology.  He did research and clinical practice in People’s Hospital, and became the director of the Institute of Hepatology, Peking Medical University. Later he was appointed vice president of Peking Medical University.  He then transferred to the Ministry of Science and Technology as the deputy director of China National Center for Biotechnology Development (CNCBD).

Wang Yu participated in the response to the SARS outbreak, and led the national response to emerging infectious diseases and public health emergencies, such as the H1N1 Flu pandemic and the Wenchuan post-earthquake disease prevention.  He led and promoted a national disease surveillance system initiative for investigation and intervention in areas with higher cancer prevalence. Internationally, he led and participated in the response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and was actively involved in the initiative of the public health system strengthening in Africa.  Dr Wang Yu was invited to join the CEO Roundtable on Cancer in 2016, and currently serves as the president of Shanghai TuoXin Health Promotion Center, which is a Shanghai based non-profit focused on chronic disease prevention and education in workplace.

Dr Wang is on the Executive Board of the Chinese Medical Association. Internationally, he serves as the member of the WHO Regional Commission for the Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication in the Western Pacific.

Gail Stephens

Gail Stephens is the executive champion of Health Care and Life Sciences at SAS, with a passion for helping customers harness data’s hidden intelligence to make the world a better place. She heads Research and Development (R&D), product management/strategy, industry consulting as well as philanthropic efforts in this industry.  She consults with customers on data-driven initiatives, and evangelizes how SAS software delivers insights that transform organizations.

A principal responsibility is Project Data Sphere, the groundbreaking collaboration between researchers and SAS that makes historical clinical trial data and analytics broadly accessible to those seeking to advance cancer treatment research. Using a first-of-its-kind platform, the project integrates SAS Health and Life Sciences, machine learning and AI as well as Business Intelligence (BI) software.

Leading collaborative teams that deliver quality software has been Stephens’s mission for 35 years at SAS. In previous roles, she developed graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and managed teams that developed some of the earliest GUIs at SAS. She also spent many years guiding the overall BI R&D efforts at SAS, an experience that provided unique insights into streamlining BI software within the Health Care and Life Sciences projects she oversees today.

A North Carolina native, Stephens graduated from North Carolina State University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. She also served on the Strategic Advisory Board for the computer science department. In addition, she has served on the executive board of North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance.

Prof Liang Wannian

Professor Liang Wannian, PhD, is the incumbent vice dean of the Vanke School of Public Health, Tsinghua University, and the leader of the National Health Commission’s COVID-19 Response & Reaction Expert Group.

From the dean of Teaching & Research Section of Sociological Medicine & Health Management to the vice president of the Capital Medical University (1997–2003), and from the deputy chief of the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau to the Minister of the Institution Reform Department of the National Health Commission (2003–2020), Liang held increasingly important positions both in the university and municipal/state functions. Liang played a central role in the national fight against both SARS and COVID-19, and gained rich practical experience in dealing with the pandemic situation.

Liang was awarded Outstanding Mid-Career Expert by the Ministry of Human Resources & Social Security of the People’s Republic of China in 1992, Municipal Outstanding Individual in Prevention of SARS by the United Group for SARS Prevention of Beijing in 2003, Honorary Title of the National Outstanding Science & Technology Worker by the China Association for Science & Technology, and another seven primary awards, along with ten technology awards.

Liang completed his MD at the Anhui Medical University and his PhD at Peking Union Medical College. He specialized in the fields of epidemiology, health statistics, health emergency management and general medicine. He has published 24 English papers in SCI and 480 Chinese papers and 46 textbooks and academic monographs as editor-in-chief.

Effy Vayena

Professor Effy Vayena is Chair of Bioethics, at the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETHZ) and renowned expert at the intersection of medicine, data, and ethics.  Her work focuses on important societal issues of data and technology as they relate to scientific progress and how it is or should be applied to public and personal health.

A keen interest in health policy has led her to work with the World Health Organization on ethical questions around reproductive medicine and research.  Upon her return to academia, Vayena helped establish and coordinated the PhD program in Biomedical Ethics and Law at University of Zurich and was subsequently awarded a professorship by the Swiss National Science Foundation.Effy Vayena believes in the value of interdisciplinarity and the application of practical knowledge to investigate ethical questions of personalised health.  Her widely recognised research has allowed her to collaborate and build strong relationships with a variety of scholars in Switzerland and from renowned institutions abroad.

Vayena is a leading expert in the dynamic and diverse field of health data and ethics, successfully leveraging her international network to promote a fruitful debate about the ethics of health in the digital age. She has previously worked with the Wellcome Trust, OECD, Commonwealth Fund, Chatham House, and academic institutions and governments around the world.  She was born in Greece and studied medicine history, public health and bioethics at universities in Athens, London, Minnesota and Harvard. From 2000-2007 she worked as a technical manager for the WHO in the field of reproductive medicine and ethics.  Since 2007 she has been a research associate and coordinator of the PhD program in biomedical ethics and law at the University of Zurich.  She is researching, among others, the ethics of personalized medicine, the moral question of genetic testing, and the ethical challenges of using Big Data within health research and clinical practice.