Rate My Professor David Harrison

Professor David Harrison is Co-Director and Head Statistician at the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre (ICNARC), where he has been employed since 2002. He is an Honorary Professor of Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Following his PhD in biostatistics from the University of Cambridge, Harrison began his career at ICNARC as a Statistician, advancing to Senior Statistician, Head Statistician, and ultimately Co-Director in 2023. In these roles, he leads prognostic modelling efforts that form the foundation of ICNARC's national clinical audits of adult and paediatric intensive care and oversees the statistical analysis for the centre's clinical trials and health services research.

Harrison's academic interests centre on statistical methods for risk prediction and outcome assessment in critical care settings. He served as chief investigator for NIHR-funded studies including Risk Adjustment In Neurocritical care (RAIN, 2007-2012) and Fungal Infection Risk Evaluation (FIRE). His seminal publication, "A new risk prediction model for critical care: the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre (ICNARC) model" (Critical Care Medicine, 2007), introduced a model with superior performance to predecessors like APACHE II and SAPS II. He contributed to its update in "Development and validation of the new ICNARC model for prediction of acute hospital mortality following intensive care" (Journal of Critical Care, 2017). With 440 research items and 37,269 citations (ResearchGate), his prolific output includes leadership in trials such as Conservative vs Liberal Oxygenation in ICU Patients (UK-ROX, 2020), Oxygenation targets in Paediatric Intensive Care (Oxy-PICU), Critical Illness-Related Cardiac Arrest (CIRCA, 2022), and FIRST-ABC on non-invasive respiratory support. He is a member of the NIHR Health Technology Assessment Programme Funding Committee. Harrison's work has profoundly impacted critical care by enabling risk-adjusted benchmarking, improving transparency in audit data access, and informing evidence-based practices in oxygenation, sepsis management, and cardiac arrest care across the UK.