Doctors Garcia Iglesias, Kerr & Tibble awarded prestigious Chancellor’s Fellowship

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The University of Edinburgh has announced its 2023 intake for its prestigious Chancellor’s Fellowship scheme. Among the 33 successful candidates are three members of the Usher Institute - Doctors Holly Tibble, Steven Kerr and Jaime Garcia Iglesias.

The University has awarded Chancellor’s Fellowships since 2014. They are designed to help the most promising academics advance from the early stages of their career to more senior roles, and to empower their ground-breaking research.

They are for academics with a vision for future leadership in research and innovation, which may straddle leading a major area of research, forging new industry partnerships, or research-led teaching innovations.

The new fellows will be supported to achieve their research and leadership ambitions through a tailored programme that helps them realise their research, innovation and leadership ambitions.

A new round of applications for the next 30 Chancellor’s Fellows will open in June 2023.

Our new Chancellor's Fellows in the Usher Institute

Dr Holly Tibble

Dr Holly Tibble first joined Usher in 2018 as a PhD student, later moving into a postdoctoral role with Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research (AUKCAR).

Find out more about AUKCAR

Holly’s research has been primarily in predicting asthma attacks using routinely collected medical data, focusing on how prescription records can be leveraged to understand patient’s medication use and their corresponding risk patterns.

On moving into her new role, Holly says:

As well as continuously refining the data analysis methods, I will be bridging key knowledge gaps in stakeholder requirements and preferences, and developing a complex intervention to evaluate how such a tool can be used to improve clinical practice. I am so happy to be continuing my work here, and am looking forward to new collaborations!

Within the institute, Holly is known for running and reinstating the Usher Community Group, as well as being an active member of the Usher Impact Committee, and the Usher Health Safety and Wellbeing Committee.

She has also worked with the EAVE II team, analysing uptake of COVID-19 therapies and their effectiveness against various virus subvariants, and continues to work with the Data Driven Innovation (DDI) team on the Data Science for Health and Social Care Masters programme.

Find out more about EAVE II

Find out more about the MSc in Data Science for Health and Social care

Read Holly’s research explorer page

Dr Steven Kerr

Dr Steven Kerr is a Senior Data Analyst with dual PhDs in both physics (quantum gravity) and economics (game theory). He also has prior experience working in the private sector in data science and software development.

Steven says that during his fellowship, he will be working on secure multi-party computation and federated analytics - technologies that enable combined analysis of multiple private datasets, stored securely in different locations, with zero information sharing.

This will allow us to unlock insights that are currently hidden away in the multitude of routinely-collected, confidential health datasets around the world, improving evidence-based medical care and patient outcomes. During the Chancellor's fellowship, I intend to build a software product that will allow health data researchers to use these transformative approaches in their own work.

Steven joined the Usher Institute in late 2020 as part of the EAVE II project which tracked the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, across Scotland in near real-time.

Find out more about EAVE II

He describes the experience as being a “trial by fire” as despite having no prior experience or background in epidemiology, he undertook a project that went onto to inform the Scottish, UK and international governments on pandemic policy and response.

Find out more about EAVE II’s impact on policy

Read Steven’s research explorer page

Dr Jaime Garcia Iglesias

Since March 2021, Dr Jaime Garcia Inglesias has been a Mildred Baxter Post Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society. In this role, Jaime has been researching the social context of Human Immunodeficiency Viruses (HIV) and other Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs).

Find out about Jaime’s recent book The Eroticising of HIV: Viral Fantasies (via Google)

Regarding his Chancellor’s Fellowship, Jaime has said:

My [fellowship] will center in exploring how the notion of sexual wellbeing (a broader, more holistic understanding of sexual health) is developed and implemented in practice, and the social implications of this for gender and sexual minority communities. I will particularly focus on the role that digital tools have in supporting wellbeing and the processes of exclusion that may happen, using qualitative methods.

Most recently, Jaime co-lead on a rapid review of the UK’s response to Mpox (also known as ‘Monkey Pox’).

Read the full report - Responding to Mpox: Communities, Communication and Infrastructures

He has also co-lead a project on the influence of dating apps on loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read Jaime’s research explorer page

Find out more about this year’s new Chancellor’s Fellows across the University