Dr Clive Adams
Dr Clive Adams is based at the Institute of Mental Health, at the University of Nottingham. He has expertise in the evaluation of the care of people living with schizophrenia – synthesis of trial data into systematic reviews, and randomised trials. Clive Adams is interested in medical informatics and has experience of biomedical search. He undertakes research in London, Oxford, Leeds, Nottingham, UK but trials are undertaken with collaborators in Australia, Brazil, China, India, reviews with people in 21 different countries. Co-ordinating Editor of the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group, interested in registers of trials, study-based registers, making data available to everyone, and tailored, auto-generation of best evidence of the effects of treatments.
Prof. Doug Altman
Doug Altman was the director of the Centre for Statistics in Medicine in Oxford and co-director of the Oxford Clinical Trials Research Unit. He has published over 700 peer reviewed articles, many aimed at clarifying statistical ideas for medical researchers. He was senior statistics editor at the BMJ and co-editor-in-chief of Trials.
He was a member of several executive groups developing guidelines for reporting research, including those for CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA, ARRIVE, SPIRIT, REMARK, and TRIPOD. In 2006 he founded the EQUATOR Network which seeks to improve the quality of scientific publications by promoting transparent and accurate reporting of health research. He received the BMJ’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015.
We were sad to hear the news that Doug Altman passed away on 3 June 2018 – a memorial page dedicated to him can be found here.
Prof. Barbara Bierer
Barbara E. Bierer is a hematologist-oncologist, is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Bierer co-founded and now leads, as faculty co-director, the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials (MRCT) Center of BWH and Harvard, a University-wide and collaborative effort to improve standards for the planning and conduct of clinical trials in the developing world. She is the Program Director of the Regulatory Foundations, Law and Ethics Program of the Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Award.
She has authored or co-authored over 180 publications and is on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Current Protocols of Immunology.
Geoffrey Bilder
Geoffrey Bilder is Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, where he has led the development and launch of a number of industry initiatives including CrossCheck, CrossMark, ORCID and FundRef. He co-founded Brown University’s Scholarly Technology Group in 1993, providing the Brown academic community with advanced technology consulting in support of their research, teaching and scholarly communication. He was subsequently head of IT R&D at Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm. From 2002 to 2005, Geoffrey was Chief Technology Officer of scholarly publishing firm Ingenta, and just prior to joining CrossRef, he was a Publishing Technology Consultant at Scholarly Information Strategies.
Tracey Brown
Tracey has been the Director of Sense About Science since 2002. Tracey has led campaigns for sound science and evidence in public life and has written many public guides to scientific research. She writes about scientific evidence, policy and the public, for national media, periodicals and books. She was a Commissioner on the UK Drug Policy Commission 2009-2012. Her recent book with Michael Hanlon, In the Interests of Safety, is an exploration of safety and security rules that have no basis in evidence, and a manifesto for changing them.
Simon Denegri
Simon Denegri is National Director for Patients and the Public at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), and Chair of INVOLVE – the national advisory group for the promotion and support of public involvement in research funded by NIHR. He was Chief Executive of the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC) from 2006 until 2011 and, prior to this, Director of Corporate Communications at the Royal College of Physicians from 2003. He also worked in corporate communications for Procter & Gamble in the United States from 1997 to 2000. He is a member of the NIHR Advisory and Strategy Boards, and a Board member of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration (UKCRC), Farr Institute and care.data programme respectively.
Dr Rob Frost
Dr Rob Frost is Policy Director within GlaxoSmithKline’s Office for the Chief Medical Officer (CMO).
The CMO is the ‘voice of the patient’ within GSK, leading the culture and governance framework to place the interests of the patient at the centre of research, development and commercialisation of medicines. As part of the Medical Policy group, Rob helps to develop internal policies and GSK external positions in areas of medical governance, including the ethical conduct and disclosure of research.
Since joining GSK in 2011, Rob has supported the development of new transparency commitments around disclosure of clinical trial information, such as the clinicalstudydatarequest.com initiative to provide external researchers with access to anonymised patient level trial data. He has also worked closely on topics relating to data privacy and ethics, including ongoing revisions to European data protection legislation.
Prof. Paul Glasziou
Paul Glasziou FRACGP, PhD is Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Bond University. Paul Glasziou was a part-time General Practitioner for many years, and the Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford from 2003-2010 and is an international leader in evidence-based medicine. His research focuses on improving the clinical impact of publications by reducing the more than $85 Billion annual loss from unpublished and unusable research (Chalmers, Glasziou, Lancet 2009). As a family practitioner this work has particularly focused on the applicability and usability of published trials and reviews (Glasziou, BMJ 2007, 2010).
Trish Groves
Trish Groves is deputy editor and head of research at The BMJ and editor-in-chief of BMJ Open. She is also an honorary research fellow at the School for Public Policy, UCL; has contributed to European Science Foundation proposals for revising the EU Clinical Trials Directive; served on the council of the Committee on Publication Ethics and the steering groups of the EQUATOR Network on transparent health research, the AllTrials campaign, and the BOLDER (Better Outcomes through Learning from Data and Engaging in Research) Initiative. She has helped to develop research reporting statements including CONSORT 2010 for trials, SPIRIT 2013 for trial protocols, and PRISMA extensions for systematic reviews.
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz is Head of Data Publishing at Springer Nature where his team help develop research data publishing policies, features, publication formats and services. He is also publisher of Nature Research Group’s Scientific Data journal and programme chair of the Publishing Better Science through Better Data conference. He has published numerous articles and led working groups related to data sharing, including guidelines on preparing clinical data for publication, and guidelines on linking publications with clinical data repositories.
Dr. Harlan Krumholz
Harlan Krumholz is a cardiologist, health care scientist, and health care improvement expert at Yale University where he is the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine. He is Director of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) and Co- Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale. He has published more than 800 academic papers and his research interests focus on improving the quality and outcomes of clinical decisions and health care delivery, eliminating disparities, and avoiding wasteful practices.
Dr. Krumholz is a Distinguished Scientist of the American Heart Association. He is on the Board of Governors of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health.
Dr Richard Lehman
Richard Lehman was a full-time general practitioner in Banbury for 32 years. For the last 17 years he has also written a weekly summary of the principal medical journals which is posted on the BMJ website. Since 2010 he has worked on studies of the patient experience, and has spent a year at Yale working with the Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) project and remains a consultant to the group. His main interest in ways to develop better informed dialogue with patients and he is on the steering committees of the NICE shared decision making initiative and Academy of Medical Royal Colleges Choosing Wisely group. He is Senior Advisory Fellow in General Practice at the UK Cochrane Centre.
Chris Mavergames
Chris Mavergames is Head of Informatics and Knowledge Management for The Cochrane Collaboration, a global health research organization working in the synthesis of health evidence for decision-making. His job is to lead Cochrane’s technology and knowledge management (people, process + technology) infrastructure and to provide vision and leadership for Cochrane’s emerging technology strategy to 2020, which will accompany the overall ‘Strategy to 2020’. Their infrastructure includes software, tools, and data stores for extracted clinical trial data and the production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, the management of a network of more than 120 multilingual websites, as well as other technology and knowledge management initiatives including the Cochrane Linked Data Project.
Prof. Martin McKee
Martin McKee is Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he founded the European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition (ECOHOST), a WHO Collaborating Centre. He is also Research Director of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and President of the European Public Health Association. He trained in medicine and public health and has written extensively on health and health policy, with a particular focus on countries undergoing political and social transition. In 2005 was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
Peter Murray-Rust
Dr. Murray-Rust leads a research group in the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University. As well as his work in chemistry Murray-Rust is also known for his support of open access and open data. Co-creator of the Chemical Markup Language (CML), he has long been a pioneer of data exchange and information-mining in the chemical sciences. Firmly committed to promoting openness and data availability throughout the discipline, he recently started the world-wide molecular matrix, the largest open online repository of molecular information in the world. He is also an Advisory Council Member for Open Knowledge.
Prof. James Raftery
James Raftery is a health economist with several decades experience of the NHS. Heis Professor of Health Technology Assessment at Southampton University, formerly director of NETSCC which manages the HTA programme for NIHR. Besides research on research he provides economic analysis of randomised trials. A keen ‘NICE-watcher’, he has provided economic input to technical assessment reports for NICE but has never been a member of any of its committees. He blogs on NICE for the BMJ.
Daniel Shanahan
Daniel Shanahan joined BioMed Central in 2013 as Associate Publisher, driving open science and research transparency strategies and initiatives across the company.
He is a member of the CONSORT Group and has helped develop a number of research reporting statements, including CONSORT extensions for pilot and feasibility studies, and embedded recruitment trials. Daniel is Chair of the Threaded Publications (Linked Reports of Clinical Trials) working group, a member of the working group for the Trial Forge initiative to improve the efficiency of clinical trials, and is also participating in strategic efforts to encourage the wider adoption of reporting guidelines, and to improve policies to combat publication bias and selective reporting, among others.
Dr. Erick Turner
Erick Turner, previously worked at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), acting as gatekeeper for new psychotropic drugs seeking to enter the US market and saw how vast amounts of data relevant to drug efficacy and safety never see publication. Since leaving the FDA for Oregon Health & Science University, he has written several papers drawing attention to the [email protected] website as a valuable source of unbiased clinical trial data. He has published papers demonstrating the degree to which selective publication exaggerates the efficacy of drugs used to treat depression, schizophrenia, and anxiety disorders. He has published a how-to paper in the BMJ5 in order to demystify [email protected] and encourage other researchers to make use this trove of clinical trial data.
Matthew Westmore
Matt Westmore is based at the University of Southampton where he is Director of Finance and Strategy for the NIHR Evaluation, Trials and Studies Co-ordinating Centre (NETSCC – www.nets.nihr.ac.uk). Within NETSCC, Matt is responsible for work around the NIHR Adding Value in Research Framework. Matt is also responsible for the ‘Research on Research’ programme; a research programme aimed at understanding research identification, funding, delivery and publication and how avoidable waste can be reduced through our work. He is also Director of the Wessex Institute, Enterprise and Partnerships, University of Southampton.
Dr Deborah Zarin
Deborah A. Zarin, M.D. is the Director, ClinicalTrials.gov in the National Library of Medicine. In this capacity, Dr. Zarin oversees the development and operation of an international registry and results reporting system for clinical trials, and the corresponding implementation of legal and other trial reporting policies.
Dr Zarin’s recent research has been on the quality of trial reporting, as well as issues in the design and analysis of clinical trials. Previous positions held by Dr. Zarin include the Director, Technology Assessment Program, at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Director of the Practice Guidelines program at the American Psychiatric Association.