Professor Sir Rory Edwards Collins FMedSci FRS
Rory Collins is a medically-qualified epidemiologist who studies how to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease in large international population-based studies. Previously Staines Medical Research Fellow at Exeter College, he is the founding Head of Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Population Health. During the past 40 years he has conducted large randomised trials which have shown unequivocally that clot-dissolving and clot-preventing treatments during a heart attack can more than halve mortality, and that lowering LDL-cholesterol with statin therapy safely reduces the risk of cardiovascular death and disability among a wide range of people. As a consequence, these treatments are being widely used.
In 2005, the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council appointed him as Principal Investigator and Chief Executive of UK Biobank. Involving 500,000 participants, it is the largest deeply-characterised prospective study globally available for any type of health research that is in the public interest. More than 30,000 researchers worldwide use it currently, generating more than 3,000 papers in 2023 alone.
