Introducing Paul:

Hi, I’m Paul and I am the principal investigator (PI) for the RAPPORT project.  I have to give full credit to Lewis though, for encouraging me to apply for this award and for doing a lot of the preparation of the original grant application.

By professional background I am an adolescent psychiatrist. I spent the first five years or so as a consultant psychiatrist working in an inpatient setting. I spent some time developing and evaluating early intervention services for young people affected by psychosis. In more recent years I’ve been working into our regional Forensic Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service for Yorkshire and Humber. Academically I’ve always been interested in applying quantitative methods to issues and problems in mental health services. In this regard there has been two main streams to my work. The first is around mental health services. The second stream is focused on medical and healthcare workforce issues, particularly selection and regulation of our NHS staff. Personally, I have never made a strong distinction between these two as the effectiveness (otherwise) of our health services and so intrinsically dependent on the quality and quantity of our health workforce. That's why I chose the rather generic title of "Professor of Health Services and Workforce Research" when I was promoted last year.

Methodologically I have a particular interest in psychological measurement and also in predictive modelling; two elements that are combined in the field of “psychometric epidemiology”. Over the years have collected a wide range of quantitative methods, and in the last decade I have been increasingly interested in the potential of machine learning to help answer important questions in health services. More recently I have become aware of the need for adopting and disseminating ‘open science’ approaches to research. This is a particular issue in relation to observational database research, and an especially severe problem once machine learning or other artificial intelligence approaches get involved. Therefore I was delighted when we got a chance to take part in the Wellcome Mental Health Data Prize programme. This is because the project will provide an opportunity to bring some of the newer machine learning based epidemiological methods the field of mental health research and it's also a chance to practice and publicise open science approaches to this kind of work.

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