Hub Team and Hub Leadership Group

Hub Team

The Hub Team has been appointed to coordinate and manage Population Research UK (PRUK).

Team roles

  • Operational Lead: Andrew Crawford
  • Communications Manager (starting in January 2025)
  • Technical Lead: Chris Orton
  • Administrator: Laura Fox

Hub Leadership Group

The Hub Leadership Group is comprised of six key roles: two directors, two LPS infrastructure chairs and two LPS forum chairs.

PRUK directors: Nic Timpson and Alissa Goodman

Nic Timpson and Alissa Goodman are equal Co-Directors who take ultimate responsibility for the delivery of PRUK Hub activity. Nic is PRUK’s biomedical science lead and Alissa is the social science lead, though both are cross-cutting.

Nic is the project’s Principal Investigator and the main point of liaison to the funders of PRUK (UKRI infrastructure funding administered by the Economic and Social Research Council and Medical Research Council) and key governing bodies. Nic holds responsibility for overseeing the project team and operational processes at the university-level at University of Bristol

LPS infrastructure chairs: Jennifer Symonds and Andy Boyd

Jennifer Symonds and Andy Boyd are directors of the LPS data services CLOSER and UKLLC, respectively. In PRUK, Jennifer and Andy are responsible for developing a map and vision for the infrastructure of LPS enhancement resources provided by multiple stakeholders including LPS studies and various data services.

Workstreams

By identifying gaps and avoiding duplication, the chairs’ work aims to ensure the added value of PRUK commissioned projects in the areas of:

  • Data discovery
  • Data linkage
  • Data access
  • Coordination/advocacy
  • Training

This coordination and optimisation of existing infrastructure will promote current activity and prioritise the development of solutions that are most useful to the LPS community.

LPS forum chairs: Rosie McEachan and Paul Bradshaw

Rosie McEachan and Paul Bradshaw are the first LPS Forum Chairs, together representing the health and social science LPS research and study communities. Their role is to build and lead PRUK interactions with the LPS community, acting as a liaison between the Forum and the Hub.

Together, Rosie and Paul are representatives of the community PRUK sets out to serve, facilitating existing and new activity which recognises the needs of, and barriers facing the LPS community.

The chairs will act as PRUK ambassadors, growing Forum membership and facilitating dissemination. Importantly, they will help ensure a community voice in PRUK decision-making.

It is intended that these Chair roles will rotate regularly. The inaugural LPS Forum Chairs are experienced LPS leaders that have the established reputations to initiate the Forum and steer it through its critical first year. In subsequent years this may be taken on by other established leaders or alternatively could provide development opportunities for ‘rising stars’ in the field, who may then be well placed to take wider leadership roles in PRUK in its next funding phase.

Hub Team member profiles

Andrew Crawford, Operational Lead

Andrew joined PRUK as Head of Operations in August 2024. He works with the Hub leadership team to ensure successful delivery of PRUK activities.

Prior to joining PRUK, Andrew spent five years as a Programme Manager at the Medical Research Council where he was responsible for Longitudinal Population Studies (LPS) and delivered the £35 million UKRI investment to establish the Population Health Improvement UK network.

Before joining MRC, Andrew spent four years as a postdoctoral epidemiologist and was research coordinator of the Cortisol Network (CORNET) at the University of Edinburgh.

Andrew obtained his PhD in Molecular, Genetic and Lifecourse Epidemiology from the University of Bristol in 2014 and holds a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Bath. He brings a wealth of experience on longitudinal population studies, research coordination and management, delivering funding opportunities, managing LPS infrastructure investments and programme management.

Andrew lives in Bristol, has three children and enjoys going for an occasional swim, cycle or run.

Andrew Crawford

Chris Orton, Technical Lead

Chris joined PRUK from its inception as technical lead.

Expertise

Working out of Swansea University, where he gained an MSc in Health Informatics, he brings expertise in:

  • Trusted Research Environments (TREs)
  • FAIR data use
  • Longitudinal Population Study (LPS)-facing research infrastructure

Chris works with the Hub leadership team to provide advice and guidance on technical systems, services, and products which are currently available and options to enhance these initiatives for the benefit of the LPS community.

Alongside Chris’ role at PRUK, Chris is Head of Business Development for the Secure eResearch Platform (SeRP) and SAIL Databank at Swansea University, involved in the establishment and development of secure technical solutions for data sharing, linkage, and research use.

Chris is also Technical Lead for the Health Data Research UK Inflammation and Immunity Driver Programme, looking at establishing federated analytics deployments to further this research and improve systematic data curation across the UK and internationally.

Chris has been involved in over £20m of investment at Swansea University with regard to research infrastructure deployment and research collaborations, and has over 10 years’ experience working with systems providing health and administrative record data at scale, as well as working directly with LPS-facing infrastructure such as Dementias Platform UK and the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration.

Chris Orton

Laura Fox, Administrator

Laura joined PRUK as a Senior Research Administrator in June 2024. Her role is to provide executive support to the Hub leadership team.

Laura has vast experience in supporting academics and has worked in the Bristol Medical School at the University of Bristol for over 15 years.

Away from work, Laura is a huge football fan, playing in 11 and 7-a-side teams. She also volunteers as the Secretary for the Bristol Football Casual League, and coaches her daughter’s under-eights football team.

Laura Fox

Hub Leadership Group member profiles

Nic Timpson, PRUK Director

Nic’s work focuses on three main areas:

  • human genetics and the undertaking of association studies for common complex health measures
  • applied molecular epidemiology using complementary study designs
  • longitudinal population-based epidemiology

As Principal Investigator for the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, Nic has aimed to maximise this and other similar resources for all stakeholders. Outside ALSPAC, he has championed cohort resources through multiple initiatives to promote longitudinal population studies; for example:

  • the recent coordination of resources to address COVID-19 through aligned data collection
  • the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration
  • the National Core Studies Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing

As co-Director of UKRI Population Research UK Nic is focused on the optimisation and support of population-based research especially at interfaces across research fields.

Read Nic’s profile at the University of Bristol.

Nic Timpson

Alissa Goodman, PRUK Director

Alissa Goodman is Professor of Economics, and Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. She is Co-Director of the Early Life Cohort Feasibility Study, a project funded by ESRC to test the feasibility of a new birth cohort for the UK, and Co-Director of Population Research UK, a UK initiative aimed at maximising the use and benefits of UK longitudinal population studies (LPS) across social, economic and biomedical sciences.

Alissa joined CLS in 2013 as Director of the 1958 National Child Development Study, having previously worked at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where she served as its Deputy Director (2006-2012), and Director of its Education and Skills research sector.

Alissa’s main research interests relate to inequality, poverty, education policy, and the intergenerational transmission of health and well-being. She was awarded a CBE for services to social science in 2021.

Alissa Goodman

Jennifer Symonds, LPS Infrastructure Chair

Jennifer Symonds is Professor of Education and Human Development at the UCL IOE, Faculty of Education and Society. Within the IOE’s Social Research Institute (SRI), Jennifer directs CLOSER, the UK’s flagship organisation for providing LPS users with education and training, knowledge mobilisation services, and data discovery tools. She also specialises in research methods training and early career mentoring in the social sciences.

Prior to directing CLOSER, Jennifer was Director of Growing Up in Digital Europe (GUIDE), Europe’s first cohort study of children and young people, and Co-Director of Children’s School Lives, Ireland’s first national cohort study of primary schooling. She has also jointly led a longitudinal randomised controlled trial of children’s wellbeing and literacy in rural Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Jennifer’s research focuses on how schools and workplaces impact the development of engagement and wellbeing in children, adolescents, and young adults. She is the incoming President of the European Association for Research on Adolescence and sits on editorial boards of journals specialising in research on adolescence and educational psychology.

Jennifer Symonds

Andy Boyd, LPS Infrastructure Chair

Andy Boyd is Director of the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC), which is the national Trusted Research Environment (TRE) for longitudinal research. He also co-leads Health Data Research UK’s ‘Trust and Transparency’ data science governance and public involvement programme.

Andy is a leading expert in TRE design and in research governance. He has a particular focus on longitudinal research; and within this on the effective development and implementation of data linkage and sharing infrastructure using inclusive, equitable and publicly acceptable methods.

More broadly, Andy’s work aims to facilitate the development of an effective, efficient and transparent system-wide governance framework for UK data science.

Andy’s background has mainly been working at the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) cohort, with additional roles at the CLOSER Consortium (data linkage theme lead) and as data linkage advisor at a wider range of UK longitudinal studies.

Andy Boyd

Rosie McEachan, LPS Forum Chair

Rosie McEachan is the Director of Born in Bradford and the UK Population Health Improvement (UK-PHI) Healthy Urban Places consortium. She is an experienced applied health researcher with particular interests in cohort studies, development and evaluation of complex interventions, environmental determinants of health, green space, air quality, and co-production.

Rosie holds a visiting professor position at University College London and an honorary chair position at the University of Bradford.

Rosie McEachan

Paul Bradshaw, LPS Forum Chair

Paul Bradshaw is Director of the Scottish Centre for Social Research (ScotCen), an independent, not-for-profit research institute and the Scottish arm of the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).

Over his career, Paul has had responsibility for design and delivery of a wide range of research projects exploring Scottish social issues, particularly related to children and families. Most notable is his role as Co-PI on the Growing Up in Scotland study, a large-scale multi-cohort, multidisciplinary prospective longitudinal study commissioned by the Scottish Government.

Over the last decade, Paul has also managed several high-profile Scottish and UK wide survey projects at NatCen, including several prominent longitudinal projects such as the 1970 British Cohort Study and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing as well as being part of the wider scientific team delivering the UK Early Life Cohort feasibility study.

Paul is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Paul Bradshaw