Prof Julia Hippisley-Cox, Primary Health (WP6)

Prof Julia Hippisley-Cox is co-lead on the academic work package for primary care and health outcomes.

Julia qualified with distinction from Sheffield University Medical School in 1989 where she was awarded the Prize in Medicine, Surgery, General Practice and Obstetrics and Gynaecology. In 1995 she was awarded a distinction in the MRCGP examination and awarded FRCGP in 2005. She became a Member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1994, and a Fellow in 2013. She was appointed as Lecturer at the University of Nottingham in 1995, Senior Lecturer in 1999, Reader in 2004. She was promoted to Professor of Clinical Epidemiology & General Practice in 2005 where she stayed until her appointment at the University of Oxford. She is also a GP in Oxfordshire.

In 2009 Prof Julia Hippisley-Cox was awarded the John Fry Award by the Royal College of General Practitioners. She was awarded RCGP paper of the year for the best paper published in the cancer category (2012) and cardiovascular category (2018). She won the BMJ paper of the year award in 2019. She was awarded the Dr John Perry Prize for an outstanding contribution to NHS IT for her work developing the widely used www.openpseudonymiser.org tool.

Julia’s research interests are very broad and include large scale clinical epidemiology, drug safety and the development of risk prediction algorithms using electronic databases from general practices. She is the co-founder and chief investigator of the QResearch database which is one of the largest clinical research databases worldwide. In 2020, it has doubled in size to cover over 2500 GP practices, representing approximately 40% of the UK population. The database is also linked to hospital, mortality & cancer data, COVID test results and ICNARC ICU data. She has developed and validated risk prediction algorithms for a range of diseases including cardiovascular disease, cancer fracture, diabetes and other conditions. These tools are now widely used across the NHS.

Prof Julia Hippisley-Cox leads on the primary care stream of Work Package 6 Primary Care / Population Health and Health Economics.