Biography

My academic interest is in Research Ethics and Integrity, specifically human participant Medical and Defence research. I work closely with the UK's Health Research Authority (NHS) as a Research Ethics Committee (REC) chair and member of the Community Committee, as well as contributing to projects including Think Ethics, Make it Public, the COVID human challenge REC, and the fast track REC pilot. I also work with other UK government departments including the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA, formerly PHE) as chair of the Research Ethics and Governance Group (REGG), and as chair the Ministry of Defence's Research Ethics Committee (MODREC). I am a trustee of the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO), and was the UK adapting author of the popular Oxford University Press "Research Integrity" online course.

Prior to moving into Bioethics my background was in Biochemistry (PhD, Southampton 2005) with several years as a post-doctoral research fellow in Professor Sir Mark Pepys' group at UCL Medical School where our work on a small molecule depleter of C-reactive protein was published on the front cover of Nature, and a second project developing drugs targeting the serum protein Transthyretin was patented and licensed to the pharmaceutical company GSK. I joined the University of Portsmouth in 2012 as a Senior Fellow, and then Senior Lecturer, in Biochemistry funded by a BBSRC new investigators award. Following further degrees in Philosophy (BA, Open) and Research Ethics (MA, Keele), I moved to a Senior Lectureship in Evidence Based Healthcare in 2017, and then Reader/Associate Professor in Bioethics as of 2021.

Research interests

• Research Ethics, Integrity and Governance
• Ethics committee review: quality and consistency
• Defence and dual use research
• Human Challenge Trials
• Research Waste
• Research Culture