New appointment
New appointment:
Professor Colin McCowan
We are delighted to announce a new professorial appointment in the medical school. Colin McCowan has been appointed Professor in Health Data Science from January 2018.
Colin, an academic computer scientist and epidemiologist, joins us from the University of Glasgow, where he has been a Professor of Health Informatics in the Robertson Centre for Biostatistics. He has research interests in the use of existing routine data within epidemiological studies and in the support of clinical trials and other research methods. His work spans a number of clinical conditions including cancer, healthcare acquired infections, cardiovascular disease, multimorbidity and care of the elderly. He has been involved in developing services to provision routinely collected clinical data for research both at the Robertson Centre, jointly running the West of Scotland Safe Haven with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and before that at the Health Informatics Centre in Dundee. He led the capacity building work stream of the Farr Institute, is one of the Scottish leads for training within HDR UK and has published widely in the epidemiological and data science literature.
He is also an experienced teacher of undergraduate and postgraduate studies with more than 5 years’ experience working as a non-clinical tutor for medical students in years 1 to 3. He has developed and delivered a number of data science related student selected components and MSc modules in subjects including Health Informatics, ehealth Records Research and Analysis of Linked Health Data which have been delivered face-to face, using a blended approach and completely online. In St Andrews he will contribute to the MSc in Health data science starting next year.