Alexander Rushforth

Alex is a post-doctoral researcher in the cross-cutting Partnership for Health, Wealth and Innovation program theme in the Oxford NIHR Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). Working with Trish Greenhalgh, Nick Fahy, Sara Shaw, and Pavel Osveiko, he is carrying out "research on research" - looking at early- and late-stage "translational research" initiatives.

For early stage initiatives, he is researching how learning occurs in public-private partnerships between universities, industry, patient groups, and the NHS in the area of drug discovery and development. He is particularly interested in experiments with “open source” partnership platforms, which aim to subvert traditional innovation approaches premised upon capture and enforcement of intellectual property rights.

His research on later stage translation focuses on efforts to translate advances in biomedical knowledge of disease into healthcare systems. For this he is following efforts to move primary and secondary care in the NHS into an era of “personalized” and “precision medicine”. This will involve tracking efforts to re-write guidelines and conduct novel implementation research on new or existing interventions premised around personalized forms of diagnosis and care.

Alex is committed to understanding how to build, maintain, and evaluate better health research infrastructures, which can support rapid, effective, and responsible development of innovations in order to meet health and social needs of societies going forwards.