About Us at the Data Science Strategic Initiative
The GOS ICH Data Science initiative is led by Dr Pia Hardelid and Professor Ruth Gilbert.
Prof. Ruth Gilbert
My research has a strong focus on using anonymised, administrative data to address clinical and policy questions for children and families. Examples include the ECHILD Database linking hospital data to education data for all children in England, data linkages to assess maternal health needs of mothers involved in family court proceedings, home visiting services for teenage mothers. I contribute to research on record linkage methods, including leading two multicentre trials with consented linkages for long-term follow up from multiple data sources. I have also established national linked data resources combining infection surveillance and clinical records across England to generalise trial findings to changing infection rates in real-world practice and am supervising a study to reactivate dormant trials through unconsented, record level linkage of education data to data from trials conducted over the past three decades, to evaluate long-term cognitive outcomes in adolescence.
My team have developed whole country, standardised electronic cohorts to compare maternal and child outcomes in England, Scotland, Ontario, Sweden and Australia. The group has also developed and validated approaches to coding for a range of conditions in children and young people, with a focus on adversity, child maltreatment and family violence.
My goal is to widen the use of health and non-health administrative data to enable research to address health within families.
Dr Pia Hardelid
My research focuses on using routinely collected health data (including birth and death certificates, hospital admission records and general practice databases) for child health research. I have used these data to estimate the effectiveness of influenza vaccines, determine the role of chronic conditions in childhood mortality, and carry out international comparisons of childhood morbidity and mortality.
My particular interest is in the epidemiology of respiratory infections in children. In 2013 I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute for Health Research to determine the burden of severe influenza in children, and examine whether influenza vaccines, antivirals and antibiotics can prevent hospital admissions. I have also carried out several studies of respiratory syncytial virus epidemiology, and antibiotic prescribing in children. I am the principal investigator for the MRC-funded Air Pollution, housing and respiratory tract Infections in Children: NatIonal birth Cohort study (PICNIC) study.
My research programme also involves analyses to examine the impact of health inequalities (due to disability, ethnic group/migration status, or family socio-economic status) on children and how these can be mitigated. I am the lead for administrative data analyses, and deputy lead of the long-term conditions theme of the NIHR Children's Policy Research Unit, and I lead the UCL programme of work for the NIHR School for Public Health Research 'Harnessing data to Improve Child Health' project.
Dr Nushrat Khan
I am a Senior Research Fellow and Data Scientist for the Neotree project.
Neotree is a learning healthcare system to improve quality of care and reduce newborn deaths in low-resource settings and we are currently working with partners in Zimbabwe and Malawi. I have a background in Information Science, with research interests in digital health, health informatics, and health inequality.