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Professor Ewen Harrison

He leads the Surgical Informatics group, performing data-driven research focused on improving patient outcomes after surgery.

Professor Ewen Harrison

Professor of Surgery and Data Science and Honorary Consultant Surgeon

Contact details

Appointments and Activities

Ewen is Professor of Surgery and Data Science at the University of Edinburgh and a Consultant HPB and Transplant Surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. 

Interests include crowd-sourcing patient-level date; surgical trials, particularly in low resource settings; mobile data collection platforms and "wearables"; automated data processing and display; natural language processing/sentiment analysis; decision modelling; Bayesian statistics; administrative data analysis; and patient reported outcomes.

He leads the NIHR Unit on Global Surgery at the University of Edinburgh, a collaboration with the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick. This provides a patform for the GlobalSurg Collaborative (globalsurg.org), an international collaboration of 5000 individuals in 420 centres across 102 countries studying outcomes in general surgery and quality improvement. 

He has an MSc in Statistics and is an Editor for HPB. His work is funded by the NIHR, Wellcome Trust, MRC and Academy of Medical Sciences. He has given the British Journal of Surgery Lecture 2017 at the 12th annual Academic Surgical Congress, the Honyman Gillespie Lecture 2016m and the Macewan Lecture 2016 at the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland. He has recently completed a James IV Travelling Fellowship UK and Davies Travelling Fellowship in Sub-Saharan Africa and North America. 

He is the Programme Director for the Masters in Surgery degree at the University of Edinburgh - a distance learning qualification which allows surgeons to train while continuing to work in their home country. 

In 2023 he was awarded an OBE for services to the Covid-19 response, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB commendation) June 1999, University of Glasgow
  • Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) July 2008. "Pharmacological strategies to reduce ischemi-reperfusion injury in kidney transplantation", University of Edinburgh
  • Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS Gen surg) June 2011. Sub-specialty exam: transplantation, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow
  • Graduate Certificate in Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sheffield, June 2012
  • MSc Statistics with Medical Applications, University of Sheffield, November 2015

Roles

2007 – 2008            President: Association of Surgeons in Training UK

2006 – 2007            Vice-President: Association of Surgeons in Training UK

2006 – 2008            Council: Royal College of Surgeons of England

2007 – 2009            Council: Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

2006 – 2008            Council: Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland

2006 – 2007            Council: Society of Academic and Research Surgery

2007 – 2008            Committee: Joint Committee for (Higher) Surgical Training

2005 – 2007            Committee: Specialty Transitional Board for Surgery

2006 – 2007            Working party: ISCP Working Party on Selection

2013 – 2016            Education and Training Committee: International Society of Hepatopancreaticobiliary Surgery

2015 – 2018            Trakcare Board (responsible for oversight of the NHS Lothian Electronic Patient Record)

2016 – present      Publication Committee: International Society of Hepatopancreaticobiliary Surgery

2017 – 2018            Honorary Secretary: Royal Society of Medicine Surgery Section

2017 – present      Communications Committee: European-African HPB Association

2017 – present      Communications Committee: ASGBI

2016 – present      Committee: Scottish Global Health Committee Executive

2016 – present      Committee: Global Health Committee, Royal College Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow

2017 – 2018            Honorary Secretary: Royal Society of Medicine Surgery Section

Editor

2013 - present         Associate Editor: HPB Journal

2017 - present         Associate Editor: The Surgeon

2018 - 2019               Associate Editor: Trials

Publications

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