Attendees K-O

Gary Leeming is the Deputy Director for the Civic Health Innovation Labs, based at the University of Liverpool. His work focuses on three main areas of design-led approaches to health data engineering, machine learning, and digital avatars for personal and population health, and civic / life sciences data governance and ethics. He leads technical development on projects including the Civic Data Cooperative, the Mental Health Research for Innovation Centre, Children GrowingUp In Liverpool (CGULL), the NHS Data Into Action programme, the Office for Life Sciences-funded Data Action Accelerator and the Civic Health-tech Innovation Zone, with an overall portfolio of over £30 million.

Formerly, he was the Chief Technology Officer at the Connected Health Cities programme, developing technology and infrastructure for Learning Health Systems and Trustworthy Research Environments, as well as investigating distributed ledger technologies for management of health data. Previously, he was the Director of Informatics at the Manchester Academic Health Science Network, working on digital innovation and health information exchanges, and CTO at NWEH, where he led the design and use of routinely collected health data in clinical trials on the GSK Salford Lung Study and other projects.

Research group/project website https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/civic-health-innovation-labs/

Judith is a Senior Lecturer in child health and psychology at Lancaster University. Her work focuses on understanding how children’s health, wellbeing and social development are shaped by family–system interactions, educational transitions, and wider structural inequalities. She has mixed-methods experience in applied research using routinely collected health needs data, working across health, education and local authority systems.

Judith's recent work has explored predictors of health and wellbeing outcomes across the transition from primary to secondary school, including sleep duration, SEND, and socioeconomic inequality, alongside qualitative research with children, parents and professionals on the SEND system. She engages with local authorities, schools, NHS, and voluntary sector partners to support evidence-informed decision-making. Judith is particularly interested in how research evidence can be translated into practical tools and frameworks that are useful to practitioners and policymakers, while remaining grounded in the lived experiences of children, young people and families.

Lindsey is a youth worker by professional background. She has worked in the NHS children's services for 22 years, both in commissioning and in operational management. Lindsey joined the NHSE North West Children and Young People’s Programme team as Regional SEND Senior Manager/Advisor in March 2022 to support local systems to improve services and outcomes for children, young people, and families with SEND. She passionately believes that if we get things right for children, then we will have happier and healthier future adults. Lindsey loves that children & young people tell you how it is without a filter, and it’s really important to her that she listens to what they are saying, backed by data to evidence and inform strategic planning, so that she can use her position to make things better for them.

Newcastle University

Professor McLaughlin is a sociologist examining disability and chronic illness, particularly within childhood and adolescence. This work involves a close focus on how institutions such as medicine, social care, and education inform the lives and futures of disabled children and young people. Attention is paid to intersectional inequalities, spaces of recognition, belonging and citizenship, and relational dynamics within family and social relations/identities. The research involves qualitative methodological practices that aim to ensure children and young people can find involvement meaningful and supportive. Specific techniques include non-participant observation, photo elicitation, creative storytelling (oral and visual), and narrative interviews. The research is informed by disability studies, youth studies, medical sociology and other fields such as social anthropology. Partnerships with disability and youth groups are also closely involved in the development of the work. The research has been supported by a number of Economic and Social Research Council grants. The work has been published in monographs (for example Disabled Childhoods: Monitoring Difference and Emerging Identities, Routledge) and journals such as Sociology, Sociological Review, Social Science and Medicine and Sociology of Health and Illness.

Research group/project website:   https://disabilityandyouthtransitions.co.uk

Alex is an analyst in the Central Analysis and Research Division at the Department for Education. He has been working on the Opportunity Mission, which aims to ensure all children are able to fulfil their potential regardless of background. Alex works across government and with colleagues outside government, and knows that connecting data will be vital to the success of this mission.

Professor Mark Mon-Williams (MMW) is Chair in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Leeds and Professor of Psychology at the Bradford Institute of Health Research.

MMW is the University Academic Director for the Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research, honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, leads the NHS Applied Research Collaboration Yorkshire ‘Data Analytics, AI and Visualisation’ group, and is an executive member of the Born in Bradford project (a longitudinal birth cohort following the lifelong development of 13,500+ children) and the N8’s Child of The North partnership.

His research is funded by UKRI councils, including the ESRC (e.g., Vulnerabilities and Policing Futures centre). He led the ‘Healthy Learning’ theme within the UK’s ‘ActEarly’ Prevention Research Programme and leads a team investigating the interactions between environmental and genetic risk factors for physical and mental health multimorbidity within the Medical Research Council LINC programme. He is the West Yorkshire academic lead for the Yorkshire and Humber Secure Data Environment.

MMW is a Founder Member of the Priestley Academy Trust (a multiple academy trust that includes the first school known to provide free meals to children and measure the impact on children’s health), and sits on the Bradford Priority Education Investment Area partnership board. He has several advisory roles, including serving as a Play Commissioner and Deputy Chair of the Department for Education’s Science Advisory Council, supporting the government’s Opportunity Mission.

Hannah is a developmental psychologist who is curious about how children learning and how researchers and educators can support children, including those who are neurodivergent, by providing the foundations for reading. She has worked on projects exploring the overlap between language and reading difficulties, the impact of Covid on young children's learning, and how we can use dynamic tests of learning to help identify children at risk of later reading difficulties.

Currently Hannah is working on several research projects; developing a web-based app (the CREATE project) based on our dynamic test of decoding from the DART project (funded by the Nuffield foundation), exploring how autistic and dyslexic people understand biblical metaphors (the NIMBLE project, part of a larger project funded by the Templeton Foundation), reviewing commercially available screeners for dyslexia, uncovering the vocabulary learning experiences of pupils with EAL and understanding how libraries can work with schools to promote and support reading.

Research group/project website:   https://dart.leeds.ac.uk/

Peter is Executive Director of Yorkshire Universities (YU), a regional partnership representing eleven universities and one specialist higher education institution in Yorkshire. With over two decades of experience, as both a senior practitioner and academic, Peter is responsible for driving YU’s increasing and influential policy engagement and activity in Yorkshire. He has worked extensively, at a senior level, across the North of England, and he has published widely on a range of matters relating to local and regional development. Peter is a Commissioner on the Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission, and he also represents YU and the higher education sector on many high-level regional groups and committees.