Rate My Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox

Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox is the inaugural Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Predictive Medicine in the Wolfson Institute of Population Health at Queen Mary University of London, a position she assumed in February 2025. She holds an honorary consultant role in Public Health at Barts NHS Trust and is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and an NIHR Senior Investigator. She earned her medical degree with distinction from Sheffield University Medical School in 1989, receiving prizes in Medicine, Surgery, General Practice, and Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 2013. Her career includes appointments as Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and General Practice at the University of Nottingham from 2005 and subsequently at the University of Oxford. She founded and directs QResearch, one of the world’s largest databases with 40 million anonymised patient records from UK general practices, developed in collaboration with EMIS Health. QResearch supports research in primary care and has facilitated the creation of numerous clinical risk prediction tools implemented across the NHS.

Julia Hippisley-Cox specializes in clinical epidemiology and predictive medicine, with expertise in primary care, drug safety, cancer, and health inequalities, particularly using large-scale electronic health record analyses. She has led the development of groundbreaking risk prediction algorithms, including the QRISK series for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes risk, which have saved thousands of premature deaths, and the QCOVID tool commissioned by UK Chief Medical Officers to identify 1.5 million high-risk patients for COVID-19 shielding and prioritised vaccination. Many of her models are the first of their kind globally and have been adopted at scale in the NHS over 15 years. She has secured over £50 million in competitive funding from NIHR, MRC, Wellcome, Cancer Research UK, and others. Her national roles include chairing the Risk Stratification Subgroup of NERVTAG, membership in SAGE subgroups, and service on CMO advisory groups, NHS Health Check Expert Panel, National Ethics and Confidentiality Committee, and as a founder member of the Confidentiality Advisory Committee. Awards include the RCGP John Fry Award (2009), Florence Nightingale Award from the Royal Statistical Society (2021), HSJ Best Use of Technology Award, and John Perry Awards (2013, 2021). She supervises PhD students in clinical epidemiology and predictive medicine.