Lynda Ware
Emeritus Senior Fellow in General Practice
Lynda was a Senior Fellow in General Practice with Cochrane UK, before retiring in 2022. Her background is in primary care and she was a GP partner in rural Oxfordshire for over thirty years with particular clinical interests in psychiatry and women's health. Since joining Cochrane UK in 2014, she visited many village halls and community centres around Oxford talking to non-medical audiences about evidence-based medicine (EBM) and its relevance to everyday life. With a colleague, Lynda also visited schools to meet students from Years 10 to 13 to teach about EBM and to encourage critical thinking, particularly around health care claims made in the media. She has blogged about Cochrane reviews for the Evidently Cochrane website. You can read Lynda's blogs on Evidently Cochrane here.
Richard Lehman
Emeritus Senior Fellow in General Practice
Richard Lehman, MA, BM, BCh, MRCGP, was a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Primary Health Care at the University of Oxford. He was a full-time general practitioner in Banbury for 32 years. He has a special interest in cardiology and palliative care, and with Miriam Johnson he published the first book on Heart Failure and Palliative Care in 2006. For many years, he wrote a weekly summary of the principal medical journals which was disseminated by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and the BMJ website. After retirement from UK general practice in 2010 he worked on studies of the patient experience, and spent a year at Yale working with the Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) project. He has also worked with Dartmouth College on shared decision making tools for use in primary care and on a number of related projects. He was Senior Advisory Fellow in General Practice at Cochrane UK.
Robert Walton
Senior Fellow in General Practice
Robert Walton is a Cochrane UK Senior Fellow in General Practice. Robert qualified in medicine in London in 1983, having taken an intercalated degree in human pharmacology and immunology. He trained at St Georges Hospital, London and became a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1986. His work applying computerised decision support to prescribing drugs in the Department of Public Health and Primary care in Oxford led to a doctoral thesis in 1998. Robert was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners in 1999 and the RoyalCollege of Physicians in 2001. He became a Senior Investigator in the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) in 2016. Robert is Clinical Professor of Primary Medical Care at Queen Mary and joint lead of the NIHR Research Design Service east London team, his research interests are in primary care, genetics, clinical trials and personalised medicine. Robert leads a five-year NIHR funded programme developing a novel training intervention to promote smoking cessation in pharmacies in east London which involves a substantive systematic review and meta analysis on behaviour change interventions in community pharmacies and will lead to a large scale cluster-randomised clinical trial. His research team is also developing a smartphone game to promote smoking cessation and researching a personalised/stratified medicine approach to tobacco dependence using computerised decision support. He sits on the NIHR Programme Grants for Applied Research sub panel A and works as an evaluator for the European Union Horizon 2020 programme (Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases, New Therapies for Rare Diseases). He contributes to UK national guidance, serving on the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Outcome Indicator and Technology Appraisals Committees. He has worked as a general practitioner in Oxford since 1988. You can read Robert's blogs on Evidently Cochrane here.
Rebecca Gould
Cochrane UK Fellow
Rebecca is a ST4 Speciality Registrar in Sport and Exercise Medicine (SEM) based in Oxford, and previously worked as a GP for two years in Devon. She has had an interest in evidence based practice since medical school and is looking forward to supporting trainees, in both primary and secondary care, to become more involved in evidence based practice.
Rebecca graduated from the University of Oxford with distinction in 2011. Whilst an undergraduate she held an Old Members’ Exhibition from 2007-09 (awarded by Lincoln College) and was awarded a Wronker Grant in 2008. She obtained MRCGP in 2016 and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Sport and Exercise Medicine at the University of Bath in 2018. She has a particular interest in the role of physical activity in the prevention and treatment of chronic disease and has presented at both regional and national conferences on this topic. You can read Rebecca's blogs on Evidently Cochrane here.
James Garrard
Cochrane UK Fellow (2021-2022)
James was a Cochrane UK Fellow and chair of the Cochrane UK and Ireland Trainee Advisory Group 2021-2022. He is a registrar in Geriatric and Stroke medicine based in Oxford. He is keen to engage with trainees from a range of specialities and regions to enhance engagement with evidence-based clinical practice.
He studied medicine from the University of Leicester in 2015 with honours, undertaking a research Intercalated BSc in 2012. He was awarded an Academic Foundation Programme at the University of Southampton, followed by an Academic Clinical Fellowship at the University of Oxford in Geriatric medicine, where he completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Health Research. He has always had an interest in research and evidence-based practice with a specialist interest in acute stroke imaging.
Rebecca Fortescue
Senior Fellow in Learning and Development
Rebecca has a background in General Practice and got involved with Cochrane Airways in 2012 while in her final year of GP training. She went on to become the group’s Feedback Editor, Deputy Co-ordinating Editor and in 2017 Joint Co-ordinating Editor. Funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (UK), Cochrane Airways supports the production, publication and dissemination of high-quality Cochrane Reviews about long-term respiratory conditions, including: asthma; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; bronchiectasis; and obstructive sleep apnoea.
Rebecca is also involved in Review Author training courses for Cochrane UK, Evidence-Based Medicine teaching to undergraduate medical students and national and international guideline production for asthma and bronchiectasis. As well as evidence synthesis, her interests include research prioritisation, knowledge translation and consumer involvement in research.
Katie Webster
Fellow in Learning and Development
Katie is a systematic reviewer with the Cochrane ENT group. She trained as a doctor, and became interested in evidence synthesis during her D.Phil. in the field of Women’s Health. Before joining Cochrane, she worked at both the National Guideline Alliance and the National Collaborating Centre for Women’s and Children’s Health, undertaking systematic reviews for NICE guideline production. Her work comprises all aspects of systematic reviewing, from development of review questions and protocols to data analysis and GRADE. She currently works predominantly on pairwise intervention reviews, but also has experience of diagnostic test accuracy reviews and network meta-analysis.