RAS Approval Panel

Carole Morris is Head of Data and Modelling Services at Public Health Scotland. Carole is responsible for four key areas including Consultancy Services, Discovery, eDRIS and Whole System Modelling. These teams provide a range of invaluable skills and services: easier access to comparative healthcare information for service providers, predictive analytics, data linkage, modelling and statistical analyses and provision of a trusted research environment for secure access to data for researchers. 

Carole started as an analyst working in NHS Lothian before moving to Information Services Division to work nationally on a variety of areas such as maternity, neonatal and data linkage. 

Carole is one of the data owner representatives for Public Health Scotland datasets.

Dr Emma Gordon is the Director of the Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) programme at the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC). Emma is responsible for setting the strategic direction for the programme and leads on the coordination of the partnership and engagement with senior stakeholders, to improve access and analysis of administrative data to inform policy decisions.

Emma joined ADR UK from HM Treasury, where she led the team supporting government economists and social researchers across government. Prior to this, Emma was Head of Health Analysis at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), and at the start of her career was a post-doctoral researcher on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Emma is Editor-in-Chief at IJPDS and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN).

Vittal Katikireddi is Professor of Public Health & Health Inequalities and an honorary Consultant in Public Health at Public Health Scotland. He is mainly interested in developing evidence to inform healthy public policy. 

Vittal studied at the University of Edinburgh, completing an intercalated degree in Medical Sciences (Genetics) in 2001 and a degree in Medicine (MBChB) in 2004. Following graduation, he worked in hospital medicine for four years during which time he gained membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP). He carried out his public health training at NHS Lothian (MSc 2009, MFPH 2010), including attachments at the World Health Organization and Scottish Government. 

After completing his PhD studying the relationship between evidence and public health policy using a mixture of qualitative policy analysis and evidence synthesis, his research has mainly used quantitative methods. His team conducts analyses of cross-sectoral linked administrative records (e.g. using register data within Brazil, Sweden and the UK) and of longitudinal survey data to understand the social determinants of health and evaluate natural policy experiments. He also uses microsimulation to explore the impacts of potential future policies on health inequalities. 

Vittal has published over 300 research outputs and is a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher. His work has been recognised through fellowships of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health and has sat on numerous grant funding panels (including currently the MRC Population Health & Systems Medicine Board).

Dr Saleh Seyedzadeh is Head of Data at The Data Lab, Scotland’s Innovation Centre for Data and Artificial Intelligence, hosted by the University of Edinburgh. He leads the TDL’s technical data and AI strategy and supervises collaborative innovation projects that connect academia, industry and the public sector to deliver economic and societal impact. 

Saleh has gained extensive experience in data science, AI methods, and secure data infrastructure by contributing to large-scale UK and international projects across several sectors, including manufacturing, health, public services and emerging AI applications. He has led data teams on multiple large-scale initiatives, including projects within the Smart Manufacturing Data Hub (SMDH), where the team was nominated for Data Team of the Year at the British Data Awards. 

His work focuses on translating advanced research into practical, responsible, and scalable solutions, including trusted research environments, federated data systems, applied machine learning, and AI governance frameworks. 

He works closely with universities, SMEs, corporates and public bodies to support data-driven innovation, ensuring projects align with ethical, trustworthy and inclusive AI principles. As part of The Data Lab’s leadership team, he also contributes to national discussions on data strategy, skills development, and AI adoption. 

Through his role on research and innovation panels, Saleh supports robust, transparent decision-making processes that enable secure and responsible access to data for research and public benefit. 

Nick Cassidy is Research Manager at the Improvement Service, the national improvement body for local government in Scotland. Nick’s experience includes applied research, developing evidence‑informed policy, and public sector improvement. His work focuses on supporting decision‑makers to use data and research effectively, particularly in complex organisational and governance contexts. 

Nick has worked across local government and related public sector environments, with a particular interest in how research and data can support service improvement, accountability, and long‑term transformation. He has experience managing research programmes, overseeing and quality‑assuring analytical work, and translating evidence into practical insights for non‑specialist audiences. 

He is especially interested in how administrative and operational data can be used to support high‑quality, impactful research. This includes questions of data quality, proportionality, and how analytical work can be designed and communicated so that it is meaningful and useful in real‑world decision‑making contexts. 

Jim Lewsey is a chartered statistician, appointed by the Royal Statistical Society in 2010, and has a long-standing interest and experience in using routinely collected health data for undertaking health research. His current research portfolio is made up of evaluating public health interventions using (controlled) interrupted time series designs, alcohol research and decision analytic modelling for economic evaluation using individual patient data.

He has developed, translated, and applied cutting-edge methodologies to my research, including synthetic controls, instrumental variable analysis and multi-state survival analysis modelling. 

Julie Fitzpatrick was Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) for Scotland from June 2021 until September 2025. This was a part-time position within the Scottish Government, which Julie carried out as a secondment from her roles as Scientific Director of Moredun Research Institute and CEO of The Moredun Foundation until her retirement from Moredun in September 2023. Julie holds an Honorary Chair in Food Security at the University of Glasgow.

As CSA Scotland, Julie championed the use of science to inform policy development. She helped ensure that the Scottish Government had access to the best scientific advice to inform its work across all policy areas. She was also a keen advocate, of Scotland’s world-leading science base and its potential to benefit the economy, people and the environment.

Julie qualified as a veterinary surgeon from the University of Glasgow's Vet School, gained a PhD in mucosal immunology from the University of Bristol and has a Masters degree in Epidemiology through distance-learning from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2007, a Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Society of Scotland in 2008 and was awarded an OBE for services to livestock research in 2014. Julie was awarded a CBE for Services to Science in July 2025.

Julie was appointed to the Board of Research Data Scotland in October 2022 as a representative for the Scottish Government’s interests and due to her experience as a Director of a Scottish Institute.

Dr Claire Hastie is a lecturer in Public Health at the School of Health and Wellbeing, University of Glasgow. She has a BSc (Hons) in Psychology, an MSc in Public Health Research, and a PhD in population genetics. Claire primarily analyses routinely collected data to explore questions of importance to public health. She is particularly interested in the environmental determinants of health and ill-health, inequalities in health, and maternal and child health.

Dr Kevin Wing is an epidemiologist with experience of the design and analysis of observational studies across a variety of settings and disease areas. His recent work focuses on the use of routinely collected health data to generate evidence of drug treatment effects in people underrepresented in or excluded from randomised controlled trials.

Kevin also has experience of leading research into ME/CFS and other post-acute infection syndromes, including involvement in a number of studies related to the long-term effects of COVID, and is currently initiating a project focusing on the use of routinely collected data to study health inequalities in the effects of extreme ambient temperature on a range of adverse health outcomes.

He also has experience of leading, designing and delivering MSc and short course teaching related to both epidemiology and pharmacoepidemiology.

Liam is a statistician working for National Records of Scotland. He has been working to link census data with administrative datasets for analysis in Trusted Research Environments since 2019. Since joining the Government Statistical Service in 2014, his career has covered industry statistics, international aid, open data, and now data linkage.

Bhautesh is an academic General Practitioner (GP) and a clinical senior lecturer at University of Glasgow in Scotland, UK. He has been a practicing GP since 2012. Bhautesh has 16 years of experience in academic primary care, winning research grant income more than 10 million pounds and publishing >130 peer reviewed publications. He is currently the national clinical lead for the primary care research network in Scotland which is a Scottish government funded network tasked with enabling research recruitment from GP practices in Scotland. In the NHS, Bhautesh is the clusters quality lead (leadership role) for Bellshill locality (North Lanarkshire) for 9 GP practices and >55,000 patients.

His research focuses on early diagnosis/screening, risk assessment and early interventions in primary care, particularly among people experiencing health inequalities. Bhautesh has experience of being a co-investigator on projects in primary care epidemiology, intervention development and primary care trials. Health care delivery, in particular, prevention and CVD management in NHS is often organised using a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Age is the most frequently used risk assessment tool in this context. A personalised approach in CVD prevention and management can transform CVD care and tackle CVD inequalities.

Danny is Professor of Public Health Informatics in the School of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Khyber Medical University, Pakistan. Danny’s research interests are in data science, machine learning, big data and health informatics with a focus on the linkage and use of routine administrative data to evaluate public health interventions using natural experiments.

As an applied econometrician, Danny specialises in the application of advanced time series techniques, such as structural time series models, to public health research with current work using time series methodology to investigate the impact of MUP on alcohol deaths and harms in Scotland.

Other research interests include investigating child and maternal health outcomes via the use of linked data as well as well as football’s lifelong impact on health and neurodegenerative disease. Danny was also involved in the evaluation of Scotland’s smoking ban on health outcomes in Scotland.