Contact information
Alex Walker
Researcher
Large database epidemiology
I am a non-clinical epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, with a particular interest in electronic healthcare record tools, time course analysis, risk stratification, prognosis modelling and novel computational methods in epidemiology.
I work at The DataLab in Oxford, primarily on OpenSAFELY and OpenPrescribing. My current activities include coordinating and conducting research within the OpenSAFELY platform, and working to build tools to make electronic health record research more transparent, reproducible and reusable.
Before coming to Oxford I was a Senior Research Fellow at The University of Nottingham, where I worked on a variety of projects relating to several disease areas, including; hepatitis C, cancer and venous thromboembolism. My work to date has mostly focused on using routinely collected data –data sources such as the CPRD, HES and ONS data– to answer pragmatic and clinically relevant questions. I completed my PhD in the Division of Epidemiology and Public Health at Nottingham, which involved pharmacoepidemiology, commonly prescribed drugs and cancer. Before that I completed a MSc in Oncology and a BSc in Biochemistry and Genetics.
For more information:
Twitter:
Key publications
-
OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19 death in 17 million patients
Journal article
Williamson EJ. et al, (2020), Nature
-
Variation in responsiveness to warranted behaviour change among NHS clinicians: Novel implementation of change detection methods in longitudinal prescribing data
Journal article
Walker AJ. et al, (2019), The BMJ, 367
-
Opioid prescribing trends and geographical variation in England, 1998–2018: a retrospective database study
Journal article
Curtis HJ. et al, (2019), The Lancet Psychiatry, 6, 140 - 150
-
Impact of chief medical officer activity on prescribing of antibiotics in England: An interrupted time series analysis
Journal article
Walker AJ. et al, (2019), Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, 74, 1133 - 1136
-
Time trends and geographical variation in prescribing of antibiotics in England 1998-2017
Journal article
Curtis HJ. et al, (2019), Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, 74, 242 - 250
-
Trends, geographical variation and factors associated with prescribing of gluten-free foods in English primary care: A cross-sectional study
Journal article
Walker AJ. et al, (2018), BMJ Open, 8
Recent publications
-
Describing the population experiencing COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough following second vaccination in England: a cohort study from OpenSAFELY
Journal article
Green A. et al, (2022), BMC Medicine, 20
-
Long COVID burden and risk factors in 10 UK longitudinal studies and electronic health records
Journal article
Thompson EJ. et al, (2022), Nature Communications, 13
-
Data-driven identification of unusual prescribing behaviour: an analysis and interactive data tool using six months of primary care data from 6500 practices in England
Preprint
Hopcroft LEM. et al, (2022)
-
Recording of ’COVID-19 vaccine declined‘: a cohort study on 57.9 million National Health Service patients’ records in situ using OpenSAFELY, England, 8 December 2020 to 25 May 2021
Journal article
Curtis HJ. et al, (2022), Eurosurveillance, 27
-
A hypothesis-free data science approach to identifying novel patterns of clinical interest in clinicians' treatment preferences: clusters of high Pericyazine and Promazine use in England (Preprint)
Preprint
MacKenna B. et al, (2022)