Keynote Speakers

John Wright is a doctor and epidemiologist with a background in hospital medicine and public health in the UK and in Africa. He established and leads the Bradford Institute for Health Research (in 2007) and Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research (in 2019), working to speed up translation of medical research into practice and policy. He is Visiting Professor in Clinical Epidemiology at the Universities of York, Leeds and Bradford and has authored over 500 papers and six books and been awarded over £150 million in research funding, £50 million as chief investigator.

In 2007 he set up the Born in Bradford (BiB) cohort study which is following the lives of over 13,000 families as their children grow up. Evidence from BiB studies has informed local, national international policies and led to improvements in clinical practice and public health as well as a successful City of Culture award. In 2016 he set up Born in Bradford’s Better Start – the world’s first experimental birth cohort with 5,000 families - to test new approaches to providing the best support in the crucial period of early life. In 2018 he established the BiB4All cohort embedding cohort recruitment into routine clinical practice and providing a long term sustainable approach to involving families in research. There are over 60,000 participants in the BiB family of cohorts making Bradford a leading City of Research.

In 2016 he set up the Connected Bradford dataset to develop one of the richest whole system datasets in the UK covering 600,000 individuals. In 2019 he established ActEarly to develop a whole systems City Collaboratory approach to improving the health and life chances of children from deprived communities in London and Yorkshire.

He has a long-standing interest in clinical quality improvement, patient safety and implementation, having established the Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research Group in 2009 which led to the UK’s largest NIHR Patient Safety Research Centre. In 2011 he established the Improvement Academy which is now one of the foremost improvement agencies in the UK supporting NHS organisations to accelerate the transformation of healthcare by adopting evidence based practice. He is the Director of Research for the City of Bradford and Director of the NIHR Yorkshire and Humber Applied Research Collaboration.

He has worked to develop sustainable public health programmes in Africa for 30 years including setting up and running an Ebola Treatment Centre for Doctors of the World in Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic. He was the research and scientific lead for Clinical and District Gold command during the COVID19 pandemic and set up the COVID19 Scientific Advisory group (CSAG). He has reported for the BBC on programmes covering Born in Bradford, Ebola and The NHS Frontline podcast.

Dr. Novak is a health systems anthropologist, Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the ADVANCE AI Center in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has focused on the design and implementation of artificial intelligence and other informatics tools in a variety of clinical environments. She has also worked with patients and caregivers to document the everyday work of managing chronic illness. Current projects include value sensitive design of a chatbot evaluation tool, documenting organizational capabilities for safe and effective management of AI, developing a maturity model for AI in healthcare, and developing strategies to engage patients and caregivers in healthcare AI. She serves on the ethics cores of two AI consortia in the United States, Bridge2AI and AIM AHEAD. She is an active mentor for graduate students in biomedical informatics and directs courses on Technology & Society, and Workflow, User Centered Design, & Implementation.

Dr. Novak holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Wayne State University and a Masters degree in Health Services Administration from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She was a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow in Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt, and she completed a Design Research Fellowship at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association.