Professor Andrew Morris became the inaugural Director of Health Data Research UK in August 2017. He is seconded from his position as Professor of Medicine, and Vice Principal of Data Science at the University of Edinburgh, having taken up position in August 2014. Prior to this Andrew was Dean of Medicine at the University of Dundee.
Andrew was Chief Scientist at the Scottish Government Health Directorate (2012-2017) and has served and chaired numerous national and international grant committees and Governmental bodies.
His research interests span informatics and chronic diseases. He has published over 330 original papers, attracted over £50 million in grant funding and was the principal investigator of several programme grants including the Wellcome Trust United Kingdom Case Control Collection for Type 2 Diabetes, Generation Scotland, a study of the genetic health in 50,000 Scots, the Wellcome Trust funded Scottish Health Informatics Programme (SHIP), and the Farr Institute in Scotland.
In 2007 he co-founded Aridhia Informatics, which uses high performance computing and analytics in health care.
Andrew was previously Governor of the Health Foundation (2009-2017), a leading UK charity that supports quality improvement in health care, and chaired the Informatics Board at UCL Partners, London (2014-2017). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences.