Evidence 2011 Chairs
We are delighted to announce the participation of these international healthcare leaders at Evidence 2011.
Doug Altman
Director, Centre for Statistics in Medicine, Oxford
2011 2013
Doug Altman is director of the Centre for Statistics in Medicine, University of Oxford. He has published over 400 peer reviewed articles, many aimed at clarifying statistical ideas for medical researchers. His varied research interests include the use and abuse of statistics in medical research, studies of prognosis, regression modeling, systematic reviews, randomised trials, and studies of medical measurement.
Doug is senior statistics editor at the BMJ and co-editor-in-chief of Trials. He has conducted numerous reviews of reports of randomised trials and other research publications and has written extensively on the need for greater methodological quality and improved reporting of research. He is actively involved in leading the developing of guidelines for reporting research, including CONSORT, STROBE, and PRISMA, and in 2006 founded the EQUATOR Network which seeks to improve the quality of scientific publications by promoting transparent and accurate reporting of health research.
Sir Iain Chalmers
James Lind Initiative, Oxford, UK
2010 2011
Sir Iain Chalmers is a British health services researcher who qualified in medicine in the mid 1960s. After working as a clinician for seven years in the UK and the Gaza Strip, he directed the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit between 1978 and 1992. He was one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration, and director of the UK Cochrane Centre between 1992 and 2002. Iain Chalmers is currently coordinator of the James Lind Initiative, which has established the UK Database of Uncertainties about the Effects of Treatments; the James Lind Alliance, which promotes joint research priority setting by patients and clinicians; and the James Lind Library, which explains fair tests of treatments and illustrates their evolution.
Fiona Godlee
Editor in Chief, BMJ
Since 1990 Fiona has written on a broad range of issues for BMJ, including the impact of environmental degradation on health, the future of the World Health Organisation, the ethics of academic publication, and the problems of editorial peer review.
In 1994 she spent a year at Harvard University as a Harkness Fellow evaluating efforts to bridge the gap between medical research and practice. On returning to the UK, she led the development of BMJ Clinical Evidence, which evaluates the best available evidence on the benefits and harms of treatments and is now provided worldwide to over a million clinicians in 9 languages. In 2000 she moved to Current Science Group to help establish the open access online publisher BioMedCentral as Editorial Director for Medicine. In 2003 she returned to the BMJ Group to head up its new Knowledge division. She has served as President of the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) and Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and is co-editor of Peer Review in Health Sciences.
Fiona has been editor in chief of the BMJ since 2005
Ben Goldacre
Award-winning writer, broadcaster & medical doctor. Author of weekly Guardian column and book: 'Bad Science'
2010 2011 2013
Ben is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dodgy government reports, evil pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks. He has written the weekly Bad Science column in the Guardian since 2003. It’s archived on this site along with blogposts, columns for the British Medical Journal, and other stuff. “Bad Science” the book (4th Estate) has sold 240,000 copies, reached #1 in the paperback non-fiction charts, and is being published in 18 countries. Ben has won various awards, including the Royal Statistical Society’s first Award For Statistical Excellence in Journalism, shortlisted in the Samuel Johnson and Royal Society literary prizes 2009, the Faculty of Public Health DARE Prize Lecture, an honorary doctorate from Herriott-Watt University, “Best Freelancer” at the Medical Journalists Awards 2006, the Healthwatch Award in 2006, “Best Feature” at the British Science Writers Awards twice, and a few other bits and pieces.
Carl Heneghan
Director, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford
Carl Heneghan is the Director of the Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine and a General Practitioner. He has had an association with the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine since 1995.
His research projects involve cardiovascular disease, self-monitoring in chronic diseases, and determining the evidence base for treatment of infections. He is a co-applicant on the £3.5million pound NIHR funded centre for Monitoring and Diagnosis in Oxford (MADOX) and works on projects related to oral anticoagulation, the prevention of venous thrombosis and hypertension management, including self monitoring and tele-monitoring.
As a clinical epidemiologists Dr Heneghan has experience in systematic reviews, observational and quantitative methodologies: he collaborates on a number of diagnostic projects and infection related projects, including antiviral treatments of influenza and treatments of upper respiratory infections, and is a Co-Director of the Oxford Diagnostic Horizon Scanning Centre, an effective early warning system that identifies innovations in the field of health technology likely to have a significant impact
He has considerable experience in teaching for undergraduates, postgraduates and teachers of EBM practice. He has co-authored the EBM toolkit (BMJ-Blackwell’s), the Statistics Toolkit (BMJ-Blackwell’s) and is lead editor of a commissioned series of BMJ-Blackwell’s toolkits. He is involved in work that promotes the understanding and teaching of critical appraisal.
