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.
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Key publications
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OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19 death in 17 million patients
Journal article
Williamson EJ. et al, (2020), Nature
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Antipsychotic Prescribing in individuals with autism, dementia, learning disability, serious mental illness or living in a care home: A federated analysis of 59 million patients’ primary care records in situ using OpenSAFELY
Preprint
Macdonald O. et al, (2023)
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Identifying Patterns of Clinical Interest in Clinicians' Treatment Preferences: Hypothesis-free Data Science Approach to Prioritizing Prescribing Outliers for Clinical Review.
Journal article
MacKenna B. et al, (2022), JMIR Med Inform, 10
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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
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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
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Comparative effectiveness of sotrovimab and molnupiravir for prevention of severe covid-19 outcomes in patients in the community: observational cohort study with the OpenSAFELY platform
Journal article
Zheng B. et al, (2022), BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 379