Liz Lovejoy has been appointed Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Health Data Research UK (HDR UK). 

This follows a competitive recruitment exercise led by HDR UK’s Deputy Chair Patsy Wilkinson and a panel from across HDR UK’s community. 

Liz has acted as Interim COO for HDR UK since April, and was also HDR UK’s inaugural COO when the institute was first established in 2017/18.  

Before taking the interim role, Liz was Registrar for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. A molecular biologist by training, she moved into public sector operational management roles after 7 years in the biotechnology industry. 

She takes up the new remit today with responsibility for HDR UK’s business strategy, capacity building, communications, finance & risk, health & safety and people team. 

“I’m really looking forward to taking up this important position at HDR UK on a permanent basis,” says Liz. “It’s phenomenal to see how far the institute has come since I was involved in the very early days. Having achieved a great deal and scaled up significantly, there’s so much for HDR UK to now build on as a truly national institute for health data science.”   

A further change in HDR UK’s Senior Leadership Team (SLT) sees David Seymour become Director of Data Partnerships. This change in job title reflects changes in his responsibilities to give greater focus on areas of strategic importance for the institute, and in particular our partnership with the NHS across the UK. 

David will be responsible for three priority areas: supporting implementation of the Sudlow Review recommendations after publication; leading the partnership work with the NHS; and increasing data utility for researchers through work on data standards, phenomics and data curation. 

David says:

“A repeated ask of HDR UK is to ‘sort the data’ and make it FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). That can only happen by working in partnership with the NHS and other custodians of health relevant data. The upcoming publication of the Sudlow Review will set out a roadmap to uniting the UK’s health data and accelerating trustworthy data access to enable research that improves lives and generates economic growth. I am delighted to be leading our work to take that forward.”