Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox

Profile

I am Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Predictive Medicine and Honorary Consultant in Public Health at Barts NHS Trust. I am a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and an NIHR Senior Investigator.  

I am founder and director of QResearch, one of the world’s largest medical research databases of 40 million patient records. QRISK algorithms have saved thousands of premature deaths from cardiovascular disease and have been used, for example, to identify people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. At the request of the UK’s Chief Medical Officers (CMOs), I led the development of the QCOVID risk tool which was used to expand the shielded patient list and prioritise 1.5 million high risk patients for COVID-19 vaccination.  Many of the risk prediction models I has developed are the first of their kind in the world and have been implemented at scale throughout the NHS over the last 15 years. 

I have gained substantial competitively awarded research funding from national research funders including NIHR, MRC, Wellcome, Innovate UK, HDR-UK ESRC, Cancer Research UK, Pancreatic Cancer UK, other research councils and charities. I have attracted over £50M of collaborative grant funding and successfully lead programme and project grants from multiple funders.

National leadership and advisory role including chair of the Risk Stratification Subgroup of New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats (NERVTAG); membership of Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) subgroups; the CMO’s advisory group on screening, NHS Health Check Expert Panel; National Ethics and Confidentiality Committee; and founder member of the Confidentiality Advisory Committee

I have received a number of national awards including the RCGP John Fry Award (2009); the Florence Nightingale Award from the Royal Statistical Society (2021); HSJ Award Best Use of Technology Award; the John Perry award for an outstanding contribution to NHS IT (2013,2021); and Research Paper of the Year from the Royal College of General Practitioners.

Research

Research Interests:

My research interests are very broad including Clinical Epidemiology, Predictive Medicine, Primary Care, Drug Safety, Cancer and Health Inequalities. I have particular expertise in design and analysis of large-scale electronic health record databases such as QResearch (www.qresearch.org) 

Supervision

Professor Hippisley-Cox supervises clinical and non-clinical PhD students in the fields of Clinical Epidemiology and Predictive Medicine.

Recent completed PhD’s include:

Dr Sarah Briggs, Development and assessment of a genetic and environmental risk model for colorectal cancer, University of Oxford, 2022

Dr Ashley Clift, Development and evaluation of clinical prediction models for risk-stratified early detection, prevention and management of breast cancer, University of Oxford, 2023

Dr Defne Saatci, Childhood, Teenage and Young Adult Cancers: Evaluation of diagnostic pathways and their long-term effects. University of Oxford, 2024