In the 2018 New Year's Honours, Senior Clinical Research Fellow Dr Ben Goldacre is appointed MBE for services to Evidence in Policy.
Ben is a doctor, academic, writer, and broadcaster. He runs the EBM DataLab in Oxford University's Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, combining the skills of academics, clinicians and software engineers to create useful tools from academic and health data. Its first output is OpenPrescribing, a live explorer for individual practice prescribing data, and a series of analytic papers arising from this. Since launch OpenPrescribing has received additional research funding from NHS England, NIHR, and the Health Foundation. He is also PI on OpenTrials, an open threaded database of all publicly accessible data and documents on all clinical trials, and on the COMPare Trials project.
Commenting on the honour, Ben said:
"The work I do is often unpopular: spotlighting unreported trials, calling out the misuse of statistics, and challenging the way we use evidence in policy. I'm surprised, delighted, and grateful for anything that gives weight to my work!"