Inaugural Lecture: Big Data, Big Picture, Big Challenge

Professor Sudlow’s research focuses on collaborative efforts to generate reliable information about both the causes (in our genes, environment and lifestyle) of - and the effects of treatment on - major diseases that affect people in middle and older age.

Cathie will describe how, over many years, we have used increasingly ‘big data’ approaches to study very large numbers of people such as:

•  to establish that simple blood thinning treatments such as aspirin can prevent future heart attacks and strokes
•  to unravel some of the differences between different stroke subtypes
•  to discover genes that influence stroke.

Cathie will explain how, in the last few years, as Chief Scientist for the UK Biobank study of half a million people, she has become involved in new big data challenges, in particular working out how to follow the health of UK Biobank’s 500,000 research participants and how to handle the incidental findings arising from brain and body scans of 100,000 of them.