Professor Jefferson joins HDR UK after a decade as academic lead and Director of the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at the University of Dundee during which time she has led on providing services to over 700 different research projects covering health informatics, data science, data management, governance, and machine learning.

Emily comes with an outstanding track record of collaboration across HDR UK’s broad community of partners including her role as Director of the HDR Alleviate Pain Data Hub; as Co-Principal Investigator for the CO-CONNECT programme, and as work package lead on the HDR UK Phenotype Library and the HDR UK Multi-omics Project.

She will take up her new post at the end of November 2022, joining HDR UK’s new senior leadership team, and will lead on the development and delivery of technology services to enable the provision of consistent and meaningful research access to health data. This includes the Health Data Research Innovation Gateway, which accelerates the discovery and access request management enhancing the ethical, secure, and transparent use of health datasets and other assets. She will lead the next stage of development which will include collaborating with Trusted Research Environment providers across the UK on federated analytics.

Andrew Morris, Director, HDR UK

Andrew Morris, Director, HDR UK said:

“HDR UK’s mission to unite the UK’s health datasets and the ongoing development of the Innovation Gateway are vital aspects of our ongoing plans.

“Emily is an exceptional leader with a wealth of skills and expertise that will be an asset to the Institute as we move into the next phase of our development.

“We are delighted to be welcoming her to the team.”

Emily Jefferson, Chief Technology Officer, HDR UK

Emily Jefferson said:

“Supporting the development of health data science is one of the most important and exciting challenges of our time.

“I am delighted to be joining HDR UK and look forward to building on the institute’s existing work across technology and infrastructure.

“I also look forward to working with the team, and with HDR UK’s partners across the sector, on supporting researchers and innovators to achieve secure and efficient access to the UK’s incredible wealth of health data.”