Ronan Lyons - Biography#

Professor Lyons has made significant and impactful contributions to public health and the discipline of health data science through research and innovation, including development of an internationally-leading data platform, leadership and research on the prevention and treatment of trauma, wider determinants of health, and more recently the COVID pandemic. His early career in emergency medicine departments stimulated an interest in the highly neglected field of injury prevention and control.

He has contributed substantially to methods behind injury surveillance and measurement of the population burden of injuries at UK, European and globally.

His leadership in developing the innovative, privacy-protecting, Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) system in Wales (https://www.saildatabank.com)and associated UK Secure eResearch Platform created a step-change in capability to mount large-scale population health and clinical research across the UK and internationally, recognised by the Council of Canadian Academies and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, highlighted in the SAIL decennial report. Major implementations of this system include the Dementias Platform UK (MRC), the International COVID1-19 Data Alliance (HDRUK) and the Australia (Australian Research Data Commons). He is Director of the Health Data Research UK’s Wales and Northern Ireland site and national director for its Improving Public Health theme. His contributions reflect a career-long investment and success in public engagement, building public trust, and extensive collaborations with clinicians, policy makers, and other key stakeholders.

During the COVID19 pandemic his unit was seconded to work for the Chief Medical Officer for Wales providing agile real-time data-enabled intelligence to support COVID19 policy responses, supported by his leadership of the MRC-funded enhanced population surveillance and intervention platform (ConCOV).

He has played a major leadership role on developing exemplar use cases and distributed analysis during COVID as part of the EU’s Population Health Information Research Infrastructure.

His Researchgate profile list >500 scientific papers, an RG score of 50 and a H Index of 70 (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ronan-Lyons-2/scores).