EDoN Welcomes Mike Oldham as Director and Lisa Farier as Head of Research Informatics

Mike Oldham has joined Alzheimer’s Research UK as the new Director of EDoN, while Lisa Farier becomes the Head of Research Informatics.

Prior to joining EDoN as the director in September 2021, Mike had already been involved with the work of the initiative as a member of the EDoN Steering Committee.

An aeronautical engineer by training, Mike spent the first part of his career with engineering consultancies. He subsequently moved into research & innovation at Innovate UK, setting up and running the Catapult network of technology and innovation centres. Since then, he worked at the National Physical Lab where he established their new Data Science Department. In November 2019, Mike joined the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC) at Harwell and not long after, started working through how to rapidly scale-up development and manufacturing of their new Covid-19 vaccine.

As the new Director of EDoN, Mike’s main role will be to ensure that EDoN delivers its full potential, with a clear scientific strategy in place and a roadmap to a suite of tools that can be rolled out as part of health checks in the future. He will also lead the establishment of a workstream to determine the roll-out and commercialisation of the toolkit developed.

In October 2021, EDoN also welcomed Lisa Farier as the Head of Research Informatics. Lisa has worked in several NHS, public health, and private sector healthcare roles. She specialises in analytics, governance, and data architecture and is experienced in population health modelling and strategy development.

Lisa’s primary role within EDoN is to lead the operational planning and supporting the smooth delivery of the initiative, including finalising data sharing and governance arrangements and overseeing risk and budget management, as well as supporting the development of strategic collaborations for the initiative.

Lisa said:
“EDoN’s innovative approach to enabling early detection and diagnosis of disease, and the ambition to develop a toolkit for use within the NHS, is incredibly exciting. Initiatives like this will be essential to improving quality of life and care as our population ages. We have an exceptional team at Alzheimer’s Research UK and within the consortium, and I’m grateful to have the opportunity to support the delivery of such an ambitious and important project.” 

Mike said:
“There are two clear aspects of this project that stand out to me: the passion of the talented people across the initiative and the intellectual challenge of how we mobilise cutting-edge analysis and technology to improve lives. Alzheimer's, other dementias, and neurological diseases will impact every one of us and our families in the years to come - we've already felt the impact in my family. If we can focus the outstanding talent that we have to create a toolkit to accelerate the early detection of disease, that will open-up a whole new raft of opportunities for treatment and management.”