United Kingdom

Professor Justine Davies, Research Lead

Professor Justine Davies' aim is to do research that informs development of health systems that deliver quality care in lower- or middle-income countries. All of her research aims to answer a policy relevant question and she often works with policy makers, including the WHO. Specialty areas of interest are conditions that require surgery to treat, injuries, and cardiovascular diseases and their risk factors. All of these specialty areas require a joined-up health system that provides good quality care. Professor Davies is the lead of the Institute for Global Innovation’s Ageing Frailty, and Resilience theme, co-lead of the Global Health Research Impact Hub and Network at the University of Birmingham. She also is the co-PI of the NIHR funded Global Health Group – Equi-Injury  

Twitter @drjackoids 

Dr Agnieszka Ignatowicz

Co-Invest Institute of Applied Health Research, Assistant Professor in Health Research Methods

Agnieszka is an Assistant Professor in Health Research Methods working in the Institute of Applied Health Research at the University of Birmingham. She is an experienced applied health researcher. Her scholarship is grounded in theories and methods found in the fields of sociology and implementation science with application to organization and delivery of care (particularly acute care) and healthcare work and professions across a wide range of settings. To date, Agnieszka’s research has been focusing on new models of care, technology in healthcare, clinical decision-making, and patient and clinician experiences. Her research led to significant advances in the understanding of how different initiatives deliver (or fail to deliver) expected benefits and support translation of the evidence for service changes, practice, and policy. She has experience in conducting systematic reviews, clinical research studies, and service model and policy evaluations using qualitative research designs.    

Twitter @DrIgnatowicz

Professor Antonio Belli

Institute of Inflammation and Ageing, Professor of Trauma Neurosurgery & Co-Invest

Mr Belli graduated from Tor Vergata University in Rome with a degree in Medicine and Surgery. He completed a doctoral degree (MD) on neurobiochemistry of brain ischaemia and reperfusion at Tor Vergata University and then moved to the UK in 1994.

He trained as a neurosurgeon at King’s College Hospital, Atkinson Morley’s Hospital, The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Great Ormond Street Hospital, The Royal Free Hospital and Charing Cross Hospital. Between 2001 and 2003 he carried out a research fellowship in neuromonitoring at the Institute of Neurology in London.

He is on the editorial board of several neurology journals and is an advisor to NICE and the Care Quality Commission.

Antonio Belli is Director of the NIHR SRMRC. Find out more about the work of the research centre on the SRMRC website. 

Twitter @belli_brain

Professor Richard Lilford

Richard J Lilford CBE, FMedSci, DSc (hon), PhD, FRCOG, FRCP, FFPH, FRCGP (hon) is Professor of Public Health at the University of Birmingham. He has pursued a successful career in medicine for over 40 years, specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology and more recently, health service research. He has research methodological expertise in the evaluation of complex interventions, rapid research, and prospective health economic evaluations of service delivery interventions. He has designed a framework for the evaluation of complex interventions that draws a crucial distinction between targeted and generic service interventions and is also interested in Bayesian statistics, medical ethics, clinical trials, step-wedge cluster trials, and multiple-indication reviews. He has also recently diversified into global health, including health and sanitation in low- and middle-income countries, treatment and prevention of leprosy and Buruli ulcers, and improving health in slums.

Twitter @rjlilford

Professor Karla Hemming

Karla Hemming leads a research programme related to stepped wedge trials, this includes both theoretical and applied research. Karla has close links with the West Midlands CLAHRC (Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care) and through this collaboration has helped establish and complete three stepped-wedge studies. Karla is affiliated with the Birmingham Clinical Trials Unit (BCTU) and provides methodological support for the design of cluster and stepped wedge trials. Karla is known internationally as an expert in stepped-wedge trials, has been invited to speak at international conferences, sits on international data monitoring committees and receives frequent requests for advice on stepped wedge trials from around the world.Karla sits on the NIHR program grants panel, the West Midlands Research for patient benefit funding panel; and is a statistical editor for the BJOG. Karla's research interests include perinatal epidemiology, meta-analysis, missing data and cluster trials. She has conducted and published research in a number of areas, including:
Prescribing errors in electronic prescribing
Large-scale organisational intervention to improve patient safety
Bayesian sensitivity models for missing covariates in the analysis of survival data
Meta-regression with partial information

Twitter @karlahemming                 

Dr Laura Quinn

Laura Quinn is a Medical Statistician working in the Institute of Applied Health Research. She works part-time on a NIHR Doctoral Research Fellowship in the Test Evaluation Research Group (TERG) and part-time as a Research Fellow in the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) West Midlands. Laura’s main research interests include interobserver variability in diagnostic test evaluation and interrupted time series analysis. Laura has an MSc in Statistics with Applications in Medicine, University of Southampton, 2016 and a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics with Statistics, University of Limerick, 2015.

Professor Krish Nirantharakumar 

Krish is a senior clinical academic with substantial experience in health informatics research. He is the theme lead for health informatics and Professor in Health Data Science and Public Health at the Institute of Applied Health Research, with affiliation to the Institute of Metabolism and Systems Research, University of Birmingham. Krish has particular interests in developing novel digital tools that enable effective/efficient healthcare systems and expedite health care research. He co-innovated the Automated Clinical Epidemiology Studies tool. The innovation has led to a number of high impact publications and to a UKRI Innovation Clinical Fellowship with HDR UK. His long term mission is to lead a global health informatics team to improve the health and wellbeing of the disadvantaged communities in low and middle income countries.

Professor Chris Baber, School of Computer Science

Chris Baber is Chair of Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. He joined the University of Birmingham in 1990 and, after working in several Engineering schools, joined the School of Computer Science in 2018. His research concerns human interaction with technology – specifically, in terms of human people form teams with intelligent technology, and in terms of sensor-based human-technology interaction.  He has published over 100 papers in international journals, as well as over 400 conference contributions and half a dozen books.  His research has been funded by the UK Ministry of Defence, RCUK, European Union and various industries. He has supervised around 30 students to the completion of their PhD.

Dr Lucia D'Ambruoso, Co-Invest

Lucia is a social scientist and health policy and systems researcher at the University of Aberdeen, interested in service organisation  and delivery, the social determinants of health, and participatory theory and method. She works with relativist theories and methods to understand and draw transferable learning on: health and wellbeing as shaped by social structures and systems; health systems as complex, adaptive, human and relational; policy norms and recognition; and social and political participation. She works with two main methods: routine mortality surveillance accounting for social dimensions of unregistered deaths, and participatory methods to shift power towards those most directly affected to know, understand, act and transform.   

Twitter @DambruosoLucia

Professor Laura Bojke, Centre for Health Economics

Laura is a Professor at the University of York, who has worked on a wide range of applied and methodological projects across economic evaluation in her 20+ years as a health economist. She has extensive experience with both trial-based, and model based economic evaluation and has led several projects looking at developing methods for economic evaluation and decision modelling. She has worked on HTA and public health type projects.

Laura has contributed to technology appraisals for NICE in her role as a member of one of the independent academic groups undertaking assessments and evidence reviews. She is also a member of a Technology Appraisal Committee and the NIHR HS&DR Committee looking at proposals for service evaluation and improvement.

Laura currently co-leads the Applied Research and Collaborations (ARC) Yorkshire and Humber Health Economics, Evaluation and Equity them. The program of work includes the use of economic evaluation across sectors, economic evaluation for local decision makers and the use of routine data for economic evaluation.

Twitter @bojke_laura

Helen Petrie, Emeritus Professor

Professor Petrie is Professor of HCI in Computer Science. She has over 20 years of internationally-recognized research on new technologies for people with disabilities and older people to improve their quality of life and well-being. Her current interests are particularly in the area of supporting older people to live independently in their own homes for longer. She has been involved in over 30 British and international projects in these areas and has published widely. She has received a Royal Television Society Technical Innovation Prize, a Social Impact Award from the Association of Computing Machinery, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Royal National Institute for Blind People. She is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Helen Petrie BA (Melbourne) MSc (Lond) PhD (Lond) AFBPS - Computer Science, University of York