NIHR CLAHRC East of England Board
Chair
Tracey Dowling
Tracy Dowling is the Chief Executive of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) and joined CPFT in 2017 from Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group where she was Chief Officer. Tracy has more than 30 years’ experience with the NHS, including 12 years at boardroom level, after beginning her career as a radiographer. Before joining the Cambridge and Peterborough CCG, she was previously Director of Operations and Delivery with NHS England, working in the East Anglia Area Team and establishing systems of assurance for clinical commissioning. Prior to that, she was Director of Strategic Commissioning with NHS Suffolk for four years, both with the Primary Care Trust and subsequent CCGs
Board members
Aliko Ahmed
Professor Aliko Ahmed is Director of Public Health England for East of England, and previously the Director of Public Health for Staffordshire NHS and County Council. He qualified in medicine, and trained in epidemiology and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, and at the University of Cambridge.
He oversees the development and implementation of Public Health England programmes and activities in the East of England including the provision of technical advice and support to local governments and the NHS. He has over 24 years’ experience working as a clinician, academic and public health practitioner in health systems across low and high income countries.
Dylan Edwards
Professor Dylan Edwards has been Executive Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at UEA since February 2016. In 2015-16 he was also interim Director of The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC), a BBSRC-supported centre for bioinformatics and genome sequencing on the Norwich Research Park.The principal focus of his research is cancer, investigating the roles of extracellular metalloproteinases in angiogenesis (blood vessel formation) and tumour cell migration, invasion and metastasis. From 2004-9 Dylan co-ordinated the EU Framework Programme 6 “Cancer Degradome” project which involved 41 laboratories in 13 countries.
Patrick Maxwell
Professor Patrick Maxwell undertook postgraduate clinical and research training in nephrology and general medicine at Guy’s Hospital and in Oxford. He was appointed as University Lecturer and then Reader at the University of Oxford. In 2002 he moved to the Professorship of Nephrology at Imperial College, followed by the Chair of Medicine at University College London in 2008. He was appointed Regius Professor of Physic and Head of the School of Clinical Medicine of the University of Cambridge in 2012. Professor Maxwell has served on a number of national grant committees and holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2005, and was its Registrar from 2006 to 2012.
Piers Ricketts
Piers Ricketts is the Chief of the Eastern Academic Health Science Network. Piers was formerly a Partner in KPMG’s Public Sector Management Consulting practice. He brings 15 years’ experience of Board-level strategic, commercial and financial advisory work in the NHS and wider public sector, particularly with clients undertaking complex change programmes.
Professor Alan St Clair Gibson
Professor Alan (Zig) St Claire is the Deputy Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Science and Health at the University of Essex. Before starting at Essex, Professor St Clair Gibson was Dean of the Faculty of Health, Sport and Human Performance, at University of Waikato in New Zealand. Prior to that, he was Head of the School of Medicine at the University of Free State in South Africa. Professor St Clair Gibson’s wealth of experience includes also being the Research Chair, Director of Research and Head of Department at the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at Northumbria University, and a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health in the USA. His research focuses on the biological and psychological control mechanisms which regulate human function and activity, with a particular emphasis on what controls our desires to do sport and what controls our body and brain during sport.
John Senior
Professor John Senior, is the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Hertfordshire. He joined as Dean of Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences in 1998 moving from the post of Head of Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has substantial experience over 25 years of research in optical communications and networking including pioneering activities concerned with optical fibre local area networks (LANs) and passive optical networks (PONs). John has lead research in a range of aspects including device and subsystem technology together with system and network development at both physical and medium access control levels (i.e. novel protocol development and analysis). John has also published widely the results of his research with now over 260 refereed journal and conference papers, being awarded a DSc degree for these research outputs in 2001. In addition, John served on the EPSRC Peer Review College from 1995 to 2011, was on the editorial board of Photonic Network Communications from 2001 to 2012, remains on the editorial board of the European Transactions in Telecommunications and is a co-opted member of the Engineering Professors Council Committee.