Cibola Life Sciences
Life Sciences Executive R&D Strategist Board Chair
I work at the intersection of science, data, and delivery — helping organisations optimise the design, development, and implementation of medicines, programmes, and the infrastructure that makes them real. Across academia, industry, and national health programmes, my work has focused on turning scientific possibility into operational reality.
Selected Impact
Across executive, advisory, and governance roles — the common thread is translating scientific ambition into things that actually work at scale.
The Work
The question running through my career — across academic epidemiology, pharmaceutical R&D, national health programmes, and government advisory roles — is how data about people can optimise the design, development, and implementation of medicines. Not data as an abstract resource, but data that is collected deliberately, governed carefully, analysed rigorously, and connected to decisions that change outcomes.
That requires understanding the full stack: how studies are designed, how data is collected and linked, what infrastructure sustains it, how analysis is structured, and how insight reaches the people who can act on it. Most importantly, it requires understanding what the commercial and clinical question actually is — and working backwards from there.
Career in Context
My career started in academic statistical epidemiology at Oxford — large-scale population studies asking what causes disease and who is at risk. That grounding in rigorous study design, in what data can and cannot tell you, and in the difference between association and understanding, has shaped everything that followed.
Moving into industry brought a different set of questions. At Amgen, I established the international observational research function. At GSK, across two senior global roles — VP Real-World Evidence & RWD, then VP Data Strategy — I led the strategy for how data could improve how drugs are discovered, developed, licensed, and optimised in the hands of clinicians and patients.
This included building the global capability to run post-approval evidence programmes, embedding observational data in regulatory submissions, and connecting evidence generation to commercial strategy across therapeutic areas including, among others, respiratory and oncology. I also served as R&D Information Security Risk Owner — board-level accountability for data integrity across global R&D.
Our Future Health was a different kind of challenge: establishing a national-scale health research programme from a blank page. Recruiting towards a cohort of five million people. Linking their genetic, primary care, and longitudinal data. Creating the technology and governance infrastructure to make that data useful to researchers for decades. Raising £160m. And doing all of it in a way that treated equity, inclusion, and public trust as design constraints, not afterthoughts.
The programme scaled rapidly and sustainably — moving from concept to thousands of registrations per day within the first six months of launch.
At EveryONE Medicines, the challenge was one that had never been attempted commercially: making individualised medicine a reality. Not just the science of finding children whose disease was caused by a specific genetic variant and designing a therapy for that variant — but the entire system required to make that model work. Treatment centre networks spanning multiple countries. Regulatory and policy frameworks that did not yet exist. Data and analytics infrastructure to track outcomes at the level of the individual. Commercial models that could sustain it.
My role was to design the strategy that would make this operationally and commercially real — holding the tension between long-term vision and the concrete steps required to move forward.
Advisory
I work with a small number of organisations at any one time — and I am selective about where I engage, because genuine depth requires genuine focus. What that engagement looks like depends entirely on the challenge.
I bring 25 years of having done exactly that, across every type of organisation in this space. When I work with a team, I get into the detail — the governance, the data infrastructure, the sequencing of decisions — because that is where strategy either holds or breaks down. The output is a material change in what an organisation is capable of.
Looking Ahead
We have more data than ever before, a deeper understanding of biology, the exposome, behaviour, and outcomes — and the analytical tools to make sense of it. Together, these are driving toward a level of understanding of individual health that was not previously conceivable.
The work at EveryONE Medicines was an early signal of where this leads: tailor the therapy to the individual with the specific variant. But that is only the beginning. The trajectory is toward data-driven personalisation at every level of medicine — not just better treatment or symptom management, but genuine cure and, ultimately, prevention.
Data will become a genuine partner for the clinician — not a tool to be consulted, but a dynamic presence in how individual patients are understood and treated. That shift will unlock a new frontier in what medicine can do, and how it is designed, delivered, and measured.
Get in Touch
The right engagements start with a genuine conversation — about where an organisation is, what the challenge actually is, and whether there is a useful fit. I am always happy to have that conversation, with no obligation on either side.