Director

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it - Director NIHR Research Design Service for the East Midlands (Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland)
Martin is the Director of the Leicester Base of the NIHR RDS for the East Midlands and Programme Manager for NIHR the LNR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC). He has expertise in both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and designs and in the management of health and social care research studies.

Research Advisors

Funding Streams

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Ruth is a Research Associate at the University of Leicester.  She joined the RDS in November 2008.  Her BSc was in Psychology and Neuroscience, her current MA is in Child Forensics: Psychology and the law.  She has previously worked in child mental health research, exploring service provision, commissioning and evaluation.  Her role within the Research Design Service is to provide research advice and more specifically to advise of appropriate funding opportunities for health research, particularly programmes available through the NIHR.

Information Specialists

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Mary provides advice and support  for NHS and social care staff who require information and literature searching advice when writing bids/proposals for NIHR funding. She is able to give advice on design and methodology of systematic reviews, scoping the literature for research proposals, developing search strategies for research projects, critical appraisal

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it - Information Officer

Christine began working for the former Trent Focus in June 2002. She has a 0.6 FTE post usually working Mondays to Wednesdays.
Her roles include:

• Identifying content for the website and the newsletter, such as sources of funding, courses and websites specialising in sources for primary care
• Literature searching including scoping searches Current awareness and guiding individuals towards appropriate sources
• Critical appraisal
• Special projects such as the production of research bulletins using systematic review techniques

Chris is a chartered librarian and have previously worked in public libraries for many years. She moved into health information after completing an MSc in Health Information Management by distance learning whilst working full time. Christine is particularly interested in public involvement in health and her Masters dissertation looked at Community Involvement in Leicester City Health Action Zone. Christine is a member of the readers panel for INVOLVE commenting on draft publications.
As a keen cyclist she is also a qualified cycle trainer teaching children and adults.

She welcomes external contributions for the newsletter and news page of our website.

Patient and Public Involvement

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Raksha Pandya has been a practitioner and action researcher in health and social care for over 12 years and brings with her theory and practice based experience of working in the fields of sexual health, substance misuse, homelessness and learning disabilities including Autism and Aspergers syndrome. Last September Raksha joined De Montfort University’s Centre for Social Action in the capacity of Research Advisor in Patient and Public Involvement for the National Institute for Health Research, Research Design Service for the East Midland (NIHR RDS EM). She has just started her doctorate at De Montfort University exploring the impact of patient and public involvement on research processes and outcomes. Her ongoing research interests include: methodology research on user involvement and participatory action research. Her areas of interest are HIV and substance use and people’s experiences of living with disabilities and in particular how these issues affect people from black and minority groups.

Statisticians and other Quantitative Methodologists

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Julia Chernova is a Medical Statistician with a broad research interest in epidemiology and medical statistics with particular emphasis on relationships between a diet, physical activity and CVD.

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Clare Gillies is a medical statistician and has been based at the University of Leicester since 2001. She has  worked on a number of projects including a Ph.D. investigating evidence synthesis methods for health policy decision making, with particular reference to policies concerning screening for type 2 diabetes mellitus. She is currently investigating differences in estimated healthy life years across member states of the European community. Clare also works on studies in a range of medical specialities for the RDS-EM and teaches on a number of their short courses.

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Laura works at the RDS one day a week and spends the rest of her time giving statistical support to the Diabetes Research Department.  Laura has a wide knowledge of designing and analysing data from clinical trials and completed her PhD in 2008 entitled “Optimising the Analysis of Stroke Trials”. Laura also has an interest in the analysis of ordinal data and carrying out meta analyses. Laura is also a lay member of the Stroke Association Service User Review Group, where she reviews grant applications from a lay perspective.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it - Medical Statistician
Nicky Spiers is a medical statistician with a background in the analysis of cohort studies of health and physical disability in the older population. She is currently employed part-time and contributes to the short course programme as well as working on studies in a range of medical specialities for the RDS-EM.

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Nick Taub is an advice coordinator and is co-applicant on two on-going RfPB-funded studies. Nick is a medical statistician, responsible for collaboration between the RDS and the Leicester Clinical Trials Unit, and is statistical expert on the Trent Research Ethics Committee. Nick has a background of collaboration on studies covering a wide range of medical specialties, with an emphasis on applications in psychiatric medicine, diabetes and related endocrine conditions, and disease registers.  Nick has been a reviewer for various medical and statistical journals, including: Psychological Medicine, Applied Statistics, Diabetic Medicine, Age and Ageing, and Stroke. Nick teaches on i) a range of short courses for the RDS, ii) the University’s MRes course in Applied Health Research, and iii) teaches and supervises students on the MSc course in Medical statistics. In 2006 Nick completed a PhD thesis on methods for estimating prevalence using disease register data.

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Freya Tyrer is a Research Fellow and has been based at the University of Leicester since 2004.  She is an advice coordinator and oversees all research projects at the NIHR Research Design Service for the East Midlands (Leicester base). She has worked on a number of projects destined for the RfPB, other NIHR funding streams and national peer-reviewed competitions, and has a particular interest in mental health and intellectual disability.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it - Medical Statistician

Claire is a Medical Statistician with experience of design and analysis of clinical trials.  Claire has previously worked on clinical trials of children’s cancer where she developed her main research interest in Survival Analysis and Cure models.  Claire also has an interest in randomisation methods, epidemiology and genetics.

Claire has a vast experience of teaching, including short courses of basic statistics and epidemiology to researchers and undergraduate medical courses in introductory research and statistics.

Qualitative Researchers

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Also an Honorary Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Leicester and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, Elizabeth (Liz) graduated in Psychology at St Andrews in 1972 and has been involved in research and/or teaching ever since. Before coming to Leicester in 1977, Liz worked at the Max Planck Institϋt in Tubingen and at Cambridge University. Her research activity has evolved from the neuropsychological and electrophysiological, via synchronising of hatching in birds, development of behaviour in human neonates and the effects of companion animals on chronically ill people, to qualitative research on Leicestershire maternity services, abuse of older women, experiencing a diagnosis of chronic illness and involvement in research from both the researchers' and participants' points of view. An experienced teacher, as well as her involvement in the RDS training programme and contributions to postgraduate courses, Liz teaches medical students and psychology undergraduates. Liz works for the RDS on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it - Research Fellow

Kate joined Trent RDSU (Leicester) in November 2004 as a Research Fellow. Her PhD and BSc were in psychology, and she has been a social science teacher for over 20 years during which time she has been involved in a wide range of health-related research. Recent research is mainly qualitative, and includes studying health professional views of ‘pre-emptive prescribing’ in terminal care at home, experiences of continuity and discontinuity in primary health care, patient/carer views of what makes health-care 'personal', young people’s information needs, and women's experiences of maternity and sexual health care. Kate is currently working on an RfPB-funded study of barriers to early diagnosis of stroke and TIA, and a study of living with nystagmus funded by ‘Fight for Sight’. Kate works for the RDS on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesday mornings.

Administrators

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Responsible for the organisation and booking of East Midlands RDS training courses and workshops.

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Della Cohen is the Leicestershire, Northamptonshire & Rutland (LNR) Unit RDS Administrator based at De Montfort University, Leicester and has been in post since 2000.  Della works from Monday to Wednesday.

Della’s responsibilities include: 

• The overall monitoring, processing and reporting of the LNR Unit’s finances;
• The administration of research consultancy by LNR Unit staff members;
• Servicing of NIHR RDS-EM (LNR) Business Group;
• Providing administrative support to Director of NIHR RDS-EM (LNR);
• The general administration of our De Montfort University office;
• Organising conferences and away days;
• Sharing regional administrative tasks with other colleagues.

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Secretary to Martin Williams (Director of the Leicester Base of RDS-EM).

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it - Assistant Administrator

To provide administrative support to the administrator and other members of staff at the Leicester Base. Sangeeta's main responsibilities include the administration of training courses and workshops together with maintaining the website and general day-to-day secretarial and clerical duties”

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Louise is responsible for the design, maintenance and development of the RDS-EM website, data collection systems and the IT side of financial record keeping. She is a member of the internal group responsible for identifying the requirements of the organisation for publicity documents, flyers and posters. Please contact Louise if you have problems with any of the links on the website or questions, comments and suggestions about the content.