Dr Laura Shallcross studied medicine at Oxford University and Guy’s, King’s and St Thomas’s Medical School. She subsequently combined training in Public Health Medicine with a 4 year MRC pre-doctoral fellowship from the MRC which funded her MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and PhD at UCL, supervised by Professor Dame Anne Johnson and Professor Andrew Hayward.

Following on from her PhD she was appointed as NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in Public Health and joined the Institute of Health Informatics in 2014. Laura was awarded a 5 year Clinician Scientist Fellowship in 2016 to undertake research to develop novel risk prediction strategies to reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing for urinary tract infection syndromes in hospital.

Laura leads a research group which uses electronic health records to investigate the diagnosis and management of infection and antimicrobial resistance, with the overarching goal to develop interventions to improve antibiotic use in healthcare settings.

Laura is a firm believer in the “team science” approach to research and collaborates widely with colleagues across a range of disciplines. Through her NIHR Clinician Scientist award she works with colleagues in informatics and microbiology at University Hospital Birmingham, and with Professor Noursadeghi’s group (UCL Infection & Immunity) on the evaluation of novel diagnostic strategies for bacterial infection.

Laura leads work-package 1 (data science) of PASS (Preserving Antibiotics through Safe Stewardship), an ESRC funded programme grant which aims to develop antimicrobial stewardship interventions tailored to a range of healthcare settings. Through PASS, Laura collaborates with behavioural scientists (UCL Centre for Behaviour Change), ethnographers (University of Leicester) and designers (Helen Hamlyn CEntre for Design).