Dr. Laura Shallcross

Biography

Laura studied medicine at Oxford University and completed her medical training at Guy's, King's, and St Thomas's Medical School. She later combined training in Public Health Medicine with a four-year Medical Research Council pre-doctoral fellowship and obtained an MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, followed by a PhD at University College London (UCL) under the supervision of Professor Dame Anne Johnson and Professor Andrew Hayward. Appointed as an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in Public Health, she joined the Institute of Health Informatics in 2014. In 2016, Laura was awarded a five-year Clinician Scientist Fellowship to undertake research focused on developing novel risk prediction strategies to reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing for urinary tract infection syndromes in hospitals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she assumed a national public health leadership role in establishing the VIVALDI study, the largest study of COVID-19 in care homes in the UK. The findings from VIVALDI significantly impacted national care home COVID-19 testing policy and informed the social care winter plan. Laura's research contributions were recognized with an MBE for her services during the pandemic as part of the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2021. She was promoted to Professor of Public Health & Translational Data Science in October 2021 and awarded an NIHR Research Professorship to develop a research programme for care homes called CHERISH in 2022. As of September 2023, she is the Director of the UCL Institute of Health Informatics.

Research Interests

Experience