Dr Robert Challen

Expertise

Health data science

Biography

Robert trained as a medical doctor and worked in paediatrics and neonatology in the NHS before moving into health informatics, where he supported the digitisation of healthcare through implementation of clinical terminology standards. He worked as head of health informatics in the BMJ Evidence Centre and has expertise in clinical decision support.

His PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Exeter was initially focussed on extracting meaningful data from the natural language of hospital patient records, through his industry partner Taunton NHS Foundation Trust. His PhD research was largely on the epidemiology of COVID, in particular the spread of genomic variants, as he became involved in the SPI-M subgroup of SAGE, which informed the UK government’s response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Post pandemic he has been working at the Bristol Vaccine Centre monitoring effectiveness of vaccines and incidence trends of acute lower respiratory tract disease, including COVID and Pneumococcus. Independently he has supported the Diabetes team at Exeter in building an instance of CPRD data and making that accessible through R. He has data analysis skills in a variety of programming languages.