The Population Data Science group, formerly known as the Health Informatics group at Swansea University Medical School, is at the forefront of the increasingly important field of Population Data Science – the science of data about people.
Population Data Science is a growing and multi-disciplinary field, which focuses on collections of individuals, and the biological, economic, social, and environment experiences that shape their lives, their health and their wellbeing.
We are proud to be pioneering this science across a range of data-intensive initiatives hosted at Swansea University Medical School. Our group led by Professors David Ford and Ronan Lyons, works locally, across the UK, and internationally to deliver a range of infrastructural, analytical and public engagement initiatives for the safe, socially-acceptable and effective use of population data for public benefit.
We Do
Develop safe, privacy-sensitive and ethical infrastructures to support research
Bring together, link and analyse data from multiple sources
Discover population-level insights
Use data for positive impact on citizens and society
Thanks to an initial £8 million of funding from the Welsh Government’s Health and Care Research Wales, we have attracted numerous external awards from a wide range of prestigious research funders, totalling over £65 million in recent years.
The Directors
Professor David Ford
About David
Professor David Ford
Professor David Ford is Professor of Informatics at Swansea University Medical School and is one of the two Directors of the Population Data Science Group.
His area of expertise lies in health informatics, eHealth, health services, population health, data protection and privacy protection, Big Data analytics, and administrative data.
His research interests focus on developing new ways of harnessing the potential of routinely-collected information from healthcare and other public sector organisations, including academia and government.
His team develops carefully designed socio-technical systems that can overcome the barriers to data sharing. These include a focus on automation and machine approaches to reduce workload, increase efficiency and reduce turnaround times; systems to automate probabilistic data linkage; and the creation of high-trust environments under full governance control, to reduce risk and increase transparency during data sharing activities.
He is Principal Investigator and Director of the Administrative Data Research Wales (ADR Wales), an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) investment as part of its £65 million UK Big Data initiative.
He is also Principal Investigator of the UK Multiple Sclerosis Register, Joint Principal Investigator of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (Nuffield FJO) data partnership; Principal Investigator and Director of the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank; Co-Investigator of Health Data Research UK; Chief Data Officer for BREATH – Health Data Research Hub for Respiratory Health; and many more others. He has received research grants and consultancy contracts valuing over £65m in recent years.
Among his other senior roles, he is also a member of numerous committees and national bodies relating to health informatics and health-related research and is past Chairman and a current Director of MediWales, representing the medical technology sector of Wales. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA). He is also a member of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) Scientific Advisory Committee, Toronto.
He has published over 40 research articles, including:
Selected relevant publications:
- A Position Statement on Population Data Science; International Journal of Population Data Science 2018
- Challenges and Potential Opportunities of Mobile Phone Call Detail Records in Health Research; JMIR mHealth and uHealth 2018
- The UK Secure eResearch Platform for public health research: a case study; The Lancet
- Cohort Profile: A national population-based e-cohort of people with psychosis (PsyCymru) linking prospectively ascertained phenotypically rich and genetic data to routinely collected records; Schizophrenia Research 2015
- A Large-Scale Study of Anxiety and Depression in People with Multiple Sclerosis: A Survey via the Web Portal of the UK MS Register; PLOS ONE 2014
- A case study of the Secure Anonymous Information Linkage (SAIL) Gateway: A privacy-protecting remote access system for health-related research and evaluation; Journal of Biomedical Informatics 2014
Professor Ronan Lyons
About Ronan
Professor Ronan Lyons
Professor Ronan Lyons, FLSW, is Professor of Public Health at Swansea University Medical School and one of the two Directors of the Population Data Science Group.
He is a public health physician and epidemiologist with more than 30 years’ experience of clinical medicine, public health and health informatics in Ireland and the UK.
His research interests focus on the secondary use of health information to support the targeting and evaluation of health and non-health service interventions to improve prevention, care and rehabilitation. After working in emergency departments for a number of years, he has an abiding interest in the prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of injuries.
Ronan is Site Director for Wales and Northern Ireland, Research Director and National Lead for Improving Public Health with Health Data Research UK (HDR UK), a £50+ million investment by UK research funders, led by the Medical Research Council.
He is also Co-Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank (Health and Care Research Wales), Associate Director of the Administrative Data Research Centre Wales (ESRC), and Associate Director of the MRC’s Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) Data Portal. His current grant portfolio exceeds £45 million.
Other senior roles include: Adjunct Professor at Monash University, Australia; Honorary Consultant with Public Health Wales NHS Trust; and Chair of the International Collaborative Effort on Injury Statistics and Methods (US CDC).
He has published 256 research articles. His top six research publications from the past five year are:
- Using data linkage to measure the population health impact of non-healthcare interventions; The Lancet 2014
- Health impact, and economic value, of meeting housing quality standards: a retrospective longitudinal data linkage study; Public Health Research 2018
- Risk of emergency hospital admissions associated with mental disorders and alcohol misuse in the household: an electronic birth cohort study; Lancet Public Health 2018
- Global, regional, and national disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for 333 diseases and injuries and healthy life expectancy (HALE) for 195 countries and territories; Lancet 2017
- Disability weights for injury burden: person-reported results from the prospective, multi-national, Injury-VIBES Cohort; Bull World Organisation 2016
- Change in alcohol outlet density and alcohol-related harm to population health (CHALICE): a comprehensive record-linked database study in Wales; Public Health Research 2016
Academic Leads
Professor Ann John
About Ann
Professor Ann John
Ann is a Professor of Public Health and Psychiatry at Swansea University and Consultant in Public Health Medicine, Public Health Wales. She has a research focus on suicide and self-harm prevention and children and young people’s mental health. She leads the MQ funded Adolescent Mental Health Data Platform and chairs the National Advisory Group on Suicide and Self-harm prevention to Welsh Government. She is a Trustee of the Mental Health Foundation.
Ann leads a research programme with a focus on applied mental health informatics leading a cross disciplinary team of data scientists, engineers, computer scientists, psychologists and clinicians. She is passionate about the translation of research into policy and practice. She is co-director of the Cochrane satellite for suicide and self-harm prevention and a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health and Learned Society for Wales.
Professor John Williams
About John
Professor John Williams
Professor Williams is a gastroenterologist who holds a chair in Health Services Research at Swansea University Medical School. He was the founding director of the University’s Postgraduate Medical School from 1988 to 2002. From 2002 – 2007 he was Director of Research and Development at the Welsh Government, a post in which he established the Clinical Research Collaboration in Wales and the Medical School’s Health Information Research Unit.
Professor Williams’ main research interests are gastroenterology, health informatics, service delivery, and patient outcomes. He chiefly focuses on better diagnosis, treatments and services – particularly in gastroenterology – and on increasing patient involvement in these processes. He has researched novel means of outpatient service delivery and changing roles in gastrointestinal endoscopy, led multicentre trials in inflammatory bowel disease and used routine data to explore patient outcomes. He has evaluated the fitness for purpose of routinely collected data to support research, audit and professional appraisal, highlighting the need for improvement in the quality of the data recorded in patient records and clinical communications.
From 2001 to 2019 he established and directed the Health Informatics Unit at the Royal College of Physicians where he drove the development of consensus based national standards for the structure and content of patient records and communications, in order to improve document and data quality, and patient safety. He is a founding fellow of the Faculty of Clinical Informatics.
In 2014 Professor Williams received a CBE for services to medicine.
Professor Julian Halcox
About Julian
Professor Julian Halcox
Julian Halcox is Professor of Cardiology at Swansea University Medical School and a Consultant Cardiologist in Swansea Bay University Health Board.
His research program addresses the understanding and prevention of cardiovascular disease using a wide range of clinical research methods including non-invasive vascular imaging, biomarkers, clinical trials and real-world population healthcare datasets. Within Data Sciences he is the lead for cardiovascular disease research for the HDR-UK research Centre in Swansea and heads up an expanding cardiovascular outcome research group. His team is focusing on the use of routinely held data to explore drivers of adverse outcomes in people with and at increased risk of cardiovascular disease in order to identify opportunities to improve cardiovascular health at an individual and population level. He and his team have a strong collaborative research network across Swansea University (SUMS, HHS, Engineering) and more widely in the UK and Internationally.
He is Academic Lead for the Welsh Cardiovascular Society; Chair of the All-Wales Working Group for CVD Prevention; a member of the Cochrane Heart Group Editorial Board; member of the Medical Sciences and Review Committee for HEART-UK; and Scientific Director and committee member of the Charity “Heart Research Wales”.
Professor Kerina Jones
About Kerina
Professor Kerina Jones
Kerina is a Professor of Population Data Science at Swansea University Medical School. She is the Associate Director for Information Governance and Public Engagement (IG&PE) to ensure data protection and to maximise socially-acceptable data utility across the various Swansea University-based Population Data Science initiatives, including: the SAIL Databank, Administrative Data Research Centre Wales, and the HDRUK collaboration. Her work spans the spectrum of Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications (ELSI), recognising the importance of social acceptability. Kerina established an active Consumer Panel to advise on research and developments in Population Data Science.
The Population Data Science initiatives hosted at Swansea University are world renowned. Kerina is internationally acknowledged as having an essential and unique leadership role in these initiatives, by focusing on innovative data governance models and public engagement to enable person-based data to be used effectively and safely. This is a rapidly developing field with changes to regulatory & governance frameworks and evolving societal perceptions. Kerina leads an innovative research programme centred on IG&PE that includes work to inform cross-centre data sharing and how emerging data types, such as genetic data, and free-text data, can be used safely in conjunction with health and administrative records.
Kerina led the active Innovative Governance working group of the UK Farr Institute from 2013 until its conclusion in 2018. At the outset, the balance was tipped towards being overly protective at the expense of innovation and learning to improve health through population data science. This left both regulators and the research community confused and ill-equipped to work harmoniously when they needed clarity and collaboration. Her group pioneered innovative practical solutions for using people’s health data safely and in a socially-acceptable way. The members are held in high esteem and continue to work collaboratively to advise and influence the developing data governance landscape to promote the safe reuse of data.
Kerina is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS), an electronic, open-access, peer-reviewed journal focussing on the science pertaining to population data, and publishing articles on all aspects of research, development and evaluation connected with data about people and populations.
Professor Sinead Brophy
About Sinead
Professor Sinead Brophy
Professor Sinead Brophy is Professor of Public Health Data Science at Swansea University Medical School, Deputy Director of the National Centre for Population Health and Well-being and Lead of Early years in the Administrative Data Research Partnership Wales.
Her area of expertise lies in population health, epidemiology, Big Data analytics and linking research data (cohort, trials, surveys) with routine health and administrative data. She is a member of the Independent Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC) of the MHRA (CPRD) and training Lead in Wales/NI HDRUK.
Her research interests focus on using routine linked data to better inform healthy development and healthy working life research. To take a life course (from birth, to school, to work, to retirement) approach to population health. She is especially interested in evidence based interventions and improving the use of existing data including work on detecting and examining multi-morbidity in children, predicting diagnosis of inflammatory disease, with a special interest in arthritis.
She has published over 176 research articles and actively publishes articles in The Conversation , including:
Conversation Articles :
Children who have afternoon school breaks are fitter but need a supportive environment. https://theconversation.com/children-who-have-afternoon-school-breaks-are-fitter-but-need-a-supportive-environment-122229
Eating disorders: early warning signs identified. https://theconversation.com/eating-disorders-early-warning-signs-identified-119886
Achieving then failing in primary school is a sign of future teenage depression https://theconversation.com/achieving-then-failing-in-primary-school-is-a-sign-of-future-teenage-depression-90982
Antipsychotics used to manage autism and intellectual disability behaviour can have serious side effects – new study https://theconversation.com/antipsychotics-used-to-manage-autism-and-intellectual-disability-behaviour-can-have-serious-side-effects-new-study-90983
Babies with healthier diets are more active and sleep better – new findings https://theconversation.com/babies-with-healthier-diets-are-more-active-and-sleep-better-new-findings-109477
Six ways to get teenagers more active – suggested by the teens themselves https://theconversation.com/six-ways-to-get-teenagers-more-active-suggested-by-the-teens-themselves-90980
Outdoor learning has huge benefits for children and teachers — so why isn’t it used in more schools? https://theconversation.com/outdoor-learning-has-huge-benefits-for-children-and-teachers-so-why-isnt-it-used-in-more-schools-118067
Recent research articles not also published in the conversation:
Mild-to-moderate renal pelvis dilatation identified during pregnancy and hospital admissions in childhood: An electronic birth cohort study in Wales, UK. Hurt L, Wright M, Demmler J, VanDerVoort J, Morris S, Brook F, Tucker D, Chapman M, Francis NA, Daniel R, Fone D, Brophy S, Paranjothy S. PLoS Med. 2019 Jul 30;16(7):e1002859. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002859. eCollection 2019 Jul.
Cardiovascular risk factors predicting cardiac events are different in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, and psoriasis. Cooksey R, Brophy S, Kennedy J, Gutierrez FF, Pickles T, Davies R, Piguet V, Choy E. Semin Arthritis Rheum. 2018 Dec;48(3):367-373. doi: 10.1016/j.semarthrit.2018.03.005.
Educational Attainment at Age 10-11 Years Predicts Health Risk Behaviors and Injury Risk During Adolescence. Demmler JC, Hill RA, Rahman MA, Bandyopadhyay A, Healy MA, Paranjothy S, Murphy S, Fletcher A, Hewitt G, John A, Lyons RA, Brophy ST. J Adolesc Health. 2017 Aug;61(2):212-218. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2017.02.003. Epub
Development of an algorithm for determining smoking status and behaviour over the life course from UK electronic primary care records. Atkinson MD, Kennedy JI, John A, Lewis KE, Lyons RA, Brophy ST; DEMISTIFY Research Group.
BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2017 Jan 5;17(1):2. doi: 10.1186/s12911-016-0400-6.
Risk of Adverse Outcomes for Older People with Dementia Prescribed Antipsychotic Medication: A Population Based e-Cohort Study. Dennis M, Shine L, John A, Marchant A, McGregor J, Lyons RA, Brophy S. Neurol Ther. 2017 Jun;6(1):57-77. doi: 10.1007/s40120-016-0060-6.
Our Research Centres of Excellence
