Dr Elias Allara is a clinical epidemiologist and public health doctor. In 2024, Elias was awarded a fellowship for the HDR UK Big Data for Complex Disease Driver Programme. Elias’ fellowship project aims to enhance cardiovascular prevention in patients with non-cardiovascular disease across different ancestries, harnessing the power of multiple population-wide and multi-omic datasets.
Elias completed his PhD at the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit of the University of Cambridge in 2020. Prior to this, Elias completed specialty training in public health medicine at the University of Turin, Italy, and medical school at the University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy.
Elias’ research has attracted >10,000 citations with H-index >35. His main research contributions include Mendelian randomization and observational analysis of molecular and behavioural traits with clinical outcomes.
Elias lectures in the Research Skills module of the MPhil in Population Health Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Previously, Elias taught research methods and epidemiology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the UK and Italy.
Elias is a Fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health and the Higher Education Academy.
This HDR UK Fellowship aims to find ways to prevent the onset of coronary heart disease and stroke among people with other long-term conditions. The problems are frequently caused by a build-up of fat in the blood vessels that supply oxygen to the heart (coronary heart disease) and brain (stroke) and this is why they are referred to as cardiovascular diseases. Some patients with coronary heart disease and stroke suffer from illnesses in other parts of the body such as the pancreas and kidneys (‘non-cardiovascular diseases’). Researchers have already found links between some non-cardiovascular diseases (for example, diabetes) and either coronary heart disease or stroke. This means that people with these illnesses can be followed up, advised to change habits which can affect their health, or given medications to address both diseases.
Currently, we do not know much about the links between most non-cardiovascular diseases and either coronary heart disease or stroke, especially in minority ethnic groups, and the mechanisms by which these links work. This HDR UK Fellowship project aims to address these knowledge gaps by studying large numbers of people from different ethnic groups, using mathematical methods that can help find links between the diseases. By doing this, the Fellow hopes to find ways to help people who have non-cardiovascular diseases avoid coronary heart disease and stroke in the future.
