Clinical Professor Public Health Informatics, Centre for Health Informatics, University of Manchester
Iain’s background is in Medicine, and alongside medical training, with intercalation in Pharmacology, he studied Statistics and Informatics. As an undergraduate in the late 1980s he wrote statistical software for clinical researchers, which grew into www.statsdirect.com with over 17,000 users worldwide today. As a junior doctor, he developed software to improve the communication of clinical guidelines between primary and secondary care. In the mid-90s he trained as a Public Health Physician while pursuing Medical Informatics research at Cambridge. In 2003 he took up his first clinical academic post at Manchester, where he has attracted over £35M of research income and founded the Centre for Health Informatics, which has around fifty staff. In 2012 he was elected to Fellowship of the American College of Medical Informatics, which is the top international honour in the field of Biomedical and Health Informatics. In 2013 his team was awarded MRC Centre status and he became director of this, the Health eResearch Centre (www.herc.ac.uk), which is now the methodological hub of the national Farr Institute for Health Informatics Research (www.farrinstitute.org).