Meet the ACRC Team
The Advanced Care Research Centre Director is Bruce Guthrie, Professor of General Practice. He is joined by colleagues from across the University of Edinburgh and Newcastle University, bringing together top academics across all aspects of caring for those in later life.
You can find out more about each of our workpackage leads and their teams by following the link to their relevant workpackages, or by following links to their staff profile.
Core Leadership
Bruce Guthrie is Professor of General Practice at the Usher Institute, in the Edinburgh Medical School.
Bruce is a mixed methods health services researcher with an interest in the quality and safety of health and social care, particularly in relation to multimorbidity and polypharmacy. As well as research, he works clinically as a GP and works closely with the NHS and government to improve healthcare quality and safety.
He is the Director of the ACRC, and one of the leads for Data-Driven Prediction and Insight.
Ian Underwood is Professor of Electronic Displays in the School of Engineering where he is Deputy Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Sensing and Measurement, reflecting his current research focus on miniature sensor systems in a range of applications including biomedical and healthcare.
Ian is Director of the ACRC Academy.
Beatrice Alex jointly leads the Clinical NLP Group at the University of Edinburgh. Dr Alex is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
Bea is one of the leads for Enhancing the Data Infrastructure.
Honghan Wu jointly leads the Clinical NLP Group at the University of Edinburgh. Dr Wu is a Lecturer in Health Informatics at UCL, London and a Rutherford Research Fellow doing clinical data science in Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh.
Honghan is one of the leads for Enhancing the Data Infrastructure.
Heather Wilkinson is Professor of Dementia Practice and Participation and the director of the Edinburgh Centre for Research on the Experience of Dementia. She is also deputy director of the Advanced Care Research Centre (ACRC) and the Academy for Leadership in the ACRC. She has a longstanding involvement in qualitative dementia research and activism and is also a trainee psychotherapist.
Heather is one of the leads for Understanding the Person in Context.
Louise Robinson is an academic GP, is Regius Professor of Ageing And Professor of Primary Care and Ageing at Newcastle University. She leads one of three national Alzheimer Society Centres of Excellence in Dementia Care Research.
Louise is one of the leads for Understanding the Person in Context.
Sohan Seth is a Senior Data Scientist at University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics with a background in Machine Learning and Data Science. His research focuses primarily on building interpretable models for extracting information from scientific data.
Sohan is one of the leads for Data-Driven Prediction and Insight.
Alan Marshall is Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods and Director of the Research Training Centre within the School of Social and Political Science. His research draws on longitudinal data from social surveys and administrative data, in the UK and overseas, to better understand the social and biological determinants of inequalities observed in health and wellbeing in later life.
Alan is one of the leads for Data-Driven Prediction and Insight.
Tughrul Arslan is a professor in the School of Engineering. His research focuses on the development of intelligent power efficient sensing systems that are non-contact, portable, and/or wearable for a range of medical conditions. He has authored over 500 refereed articles and 25 patents, most of which have been licensed/sold to spinout or tier1 companies.
Tughrul is one of the leads in New Technologies of Care.
Eileen Kaner is Professor of Public Health and Primary Care Research and an applied behavioural scientist with expertise in intervention-based research; she is also Director of the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration for the North East and North Cumbria region of England.
Eileen is one of the leads for New Models of Care.
Find out more about Eileen Kaner on their profile page
Jacques Fleuriot is Personal Chair of Artificial Intelligence, and Director of the Artificial Intelligence and its Application in the School of Informatics. is research focuses on AI modelling, which spans areas such as formal verification, process modelling, and explainable AI in healthcare and other complex domains.
Jacques is a lead for New Technologies of Care.
Stewart Mercer is a General Practitioner, Professor of Primary Care and Multimorbidity and Director of the Scottish School of Primary Care. His research focuses on understanding and responding to the needs of people with multiple complex conditions.
Stewart is a lead for New Models of Care.
Barbara Hanratty is a GP, Professor of Primary Care and Public Health and deputy director of the NIHR Policy Research Unit for Older People and Frailty. Her research concerns older people, with a focus on the health and social care interface, end of life and long term care.
Barbara is one of the leads for New Models of Care.
Lucy McCloughan is the Programme Manager for ACRC having previously managed Health Data Research Scotland from 2018 and Farr Scotland from 2017. From 2012 she was eHealth Research Manager at the University of Edinburgh Medical School overseeing a programme of randomised controlled trials and qualitative studies investigating telemetric self-monitoring of long term health conditions along with a programme investigating ePrescribing systems in English hospitals. Prior to that she managed the Scottish Mental Health Research Network from 2007-2009 and the Scottish Primary Care Research Network from 2002-2007. Before moving into research management, she was on the “coal face” as a researcher working with people with visual disabilities, working at the Oxford Eye Hospital and the Princess Alexandra Eye Hospital in Edinburgh.
Lucy heads up the Programme Management Office.
Kate Morris is the Project Manager for the ACRC Academy. Prior to this, she was Project Manager for ThermaSMART, an international research project with 18 partners on five continents. She also worked as Project Manager on the teaching response to Covid in the School of Engineering. She has a background in publishing, where she was a non-fiction editor for firms including HarperCollins and Bloomsbury, and was Publications Manager for the Basic Skills Agency, a national educational charity.
Kate manages the ACRC Academy.
Wide-ranging expertise
The University of Edinburgh has a rich expertise working on issues related to the ageing population, and the challenges this brings both at home and globally.
In addition to the Core Leadership team noted above, the Advanced Care Research Centre is bringing together expertise from across all three Colleges of the University of Edinburgh joined by colleagues from Newcastle University, combining research across fields including medicine and other care professions, life sciences, engineering, informatics, data and social sciences - with the person in later life at the heart of all we do.