Emeritus Professor Michael Goldacre
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Michael Goldacre
BM, BCh, MA, MSc, FFPH, FRCP
Emeritus Professor of Public Health
Michael Goldacre is an emeritus professor of public health at Oxford Population Health at the University of Oxford. He qualified in medicine from Oxford.
After several hospital posts, he studied public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. For most of his career he has worked approximately half-time as a consultant in NHS service public health and half-time in academic public health.
In both roles he has made extensive use of large medical datasets of hospital and death records, including the Oxford record linkage study (data from 1963) and English national hospital data (from 1968, with linkage from 1998) for epidemiological and health services research.
Current research interests in these datasets include the study of long-term time trends, geographical variation, and the co-occurrence of different diseases in the same individuals (“given disease A, what is the probability that disease B will follow?”) From 1986 - 2015 he was Director of the Unit of Health-Care Epidemiology (UHCE).
From 1993-2015, he also directed the UK Medical Careers Research Group (MCRG), a UK-wide series of cohort studies that track the career choices, progression and views of about 55,000 doctors in qualification years ranging from 1974-2015. He continues to work with the UHCE and MCRG. He has been a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford since 1985. His publications in peer-review journals can be seen at