About Us

Alison has experience as a junior hospital doctor working in general medicine, nephrology, medical oncology, cardiology, general surgery and urology. However, most of her career has been spent working in the field of evidence-based medicine for organisations including Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin, the BMJ Group, Matrix Knowledge Group, Evidera and Crystallise. At the BMJ Group she was a Senior Clinical Editor on evidence-based publications for clinicians and other health care staff and researchers, including BMJ Clinical Evidence, BMJ Best Practice and BMJ Action Sets.

During her time at Matrix, Alison led the team that delivered evidence reviews for a wide range of clients including NICE, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the Health Foundation, the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. At Evidera, she led a series of systematic reviews and HTA submissions for pharmaceutical companies. At Crystallise, Alison has led the development of the heoro.com database and the Evidence Map deliverable. She has helped with content generation and editing of reports for the Legal and General Longevity Science Panel and conducted targeted and systematic reviews for pharmaceutical clients, including HTA submissions to NICE.

Ashley is a Actuary with over 10 years’ experience working in the insurance and pensions industry. He is a consultant in the areas of longevity, mortality and infectious disease risk modelling and has worked with some of the largest insurers, reinsurers, and pensions consultants in the market. His area of expertise is devising innovative multi-disciplinary solutions to clients’ risk modelling problems, leveraging his experience across actuarial modelling, cause-of-death and risk factors-based mortality and longevity modelling, and catastrophe risk modelling.

Ashley has a bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Science and Mathematics from the University of Manchester, he is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (FIA) and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary (CERA).

Holly completed a BSc in Neuroscience from the University of Sussex and went on to do a MSc in Public Health at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. During both her university courses she completed modules on medical research methods and statistics. For her master‘s dissertation, Holly completed a systematic review titled: “The Experience of Dementia Diagnosis in Individuals from Black and Minority Ethnic Groups: A Systematic Review and Qualitative synthesis. At Crystallise, Holly project manages and assists with all aspects of the systematic reviews process.

Hannah has a BSc in Biomedical Science from the University of Hertfordshire. As part of her degree, she studied bioscience research methods and wrote a literature review on how dietary supplements effect cognitive function.

Nicola has a BSc in Psychology from Leeds Beckett University and an MSc in Health Psychology from Staffordshire University. As part of her BSc, Nicola completed a research assistant placement working within the Stigmatised Sexualities and Sexual Harm Research Group which involved assisting on a literature review to inform the production of infographics to challenge commonly held myths surrounding sexual violence and abuse. Throughout university she has specialised in cognitive, experimental psychology. Her undergraduate research project investigated the effect of emotion on visual perception and attention and her postgraduate research project used eye–tracking to investigate health priming, visual attention and food choice.

Jay has a BMedSci in Medical Science and a PhD in Vascular Pathology from De Montfort University. He has experience in cell culture and cell signalling, having investigated the effects of diabetes-associated inflammatory cytokines, on the signalling cascade of the Angiopoietin/Tie receptor pathway in endothelial cells. Whilst completing his PhD, Jay also worked as a part-time lecturer and attained the award of Associate Fellow for the Higher Education Academy. Jay has published a literature review in the Journal of Receptors and Signal Transduction and abstracts in Heart BMJ, as well as presenting data at the British Society for Cardiovascular Research (BSCR) conference.

Fern graduated from Bangor University in 2017 with a 1st class BSc in Biomedical Science. She has also undertaken postgraduate projects about the molecular cell biology of dementia, and metastatic cancer. Prior to working at Crystallise, she worked in NHS pathology laboratories. At Crystallise, she works in the systematic reviews team.

Christianah studied Medicine at the University of Lagos. She also obtained an intercalated BSc in Physiology. She has experience as a medical officer working in general medicine and general surgery. While studying, Christianah completed courses on principles of epidemiology, research methodology and medical statistics. She also researched on how Moringa oleifera affects cardiovascular functions in albino rats.

At Crystallise, Christianah works with the reviews team and is involved all aspects of the systematic review process.

Eleanor has a BSc in Medical Sciences from the University of Leeds. For her dissertation, Eleanor completed a grant proposal as well as a critical review titled: “The Validity of Metagenomic Next Generation Sequencing for the Clinical Diagnosis of Infectious Diseases and to Improve Clinical Outcomes”. Eleanor also has experience as a clinical support worker in a teaching hospital.

Tahera has a BSc in Psychology from Lancaster University and has completed post graduate modules in statistics in health research, principles and methods of systematic reviews, and design and interpretation of clinical trials. Tahera has experience as an academic health researcher with the University of Central Lancashire and has published on stroke management and multi-morbidity in older people. She also supported the teaching of the NETSMART (Neurological Education and Training in Stroke Management and Acute Reperfusion Therapy) module.

At Crystallise, Tahera works with the reviews team, assisting with all aspects of the systematic review process.

With decades of experience in accountancy, book-keeping, business administration and recruitment, including running her own staffing agency and office services company for many years, Sue is now responsible for business administration at Crystallise, and finds and hires the awesome talent required to keep Crystallise over-delivering on the diverse range of projects it takes on.

If you are interested in working for Crystallise she is the person to get in touch with, or if you want to know more about how Crystallise can help solve your modelling and informatics problems she can put you in touch with the right people.

Simplified Data is led by Danielle Bodicoat, a former lecturer in epidemiology. She is an experienced medical statistician and medical writer with a solid theoretical grounding. She has a 1st class BSc in Mathematics with Statistics, an MSc in Medical Statistics (Distinction) for which she was awarded a scholarship for by GlaxoSmithKline, and a PhD in Epidemiology. She has over 12 years of applied experience with a proven track record including 80 plus peer-reviewed publications. She has spent years designing, conducting and supervising statistical analyses.

As well as authoring her own papers, she has written and coordinated grant applications that have attracted over £8 million in funding and has also written numerous clinical trial protocols.

Rahul splits his clinical time between respiratory medicine and critical care as a consultant physician within NHS. He completed his postgraduate training in Liverpool and in the south-east of England after gaining his undergraduate qualification in India. Alongside having more than 22 years of clinical experience, he also teaches undergraduates from King’s College London. He has significant involvement in postgraduate training on behalf of Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine and is an examiner for the European Diploma in Intensive Care. In order to enhance his understanding in clinical epidemiology, he gained Masters In Public Health from Harvard University. He has examined multiple clinical prediction models for underlying bias as part of his Masters thesis and published the results in the Lancet Digital Health with other co-authors. He is involved in multicentre clinical trials as Principal Investigator for his site. Rahul has also developed a multimodality clinical prediction model during the Covid pandemic and works with machine learning teams to include deeper physiological features in clinical prediction.

Nicky is the co-founder of Medical Intelligence established in 2007, a consultancy which provides impartial expert insights into the main drivers behind changes in life expectancy and disease risk for the insurance industry.

Nicky works directly with clients to increase their understanding of the medical and socio-demographic elements that impact mortality, morbidity, and longevity risk. A leading mortality and longevity expert, Nicky provides full consulting support to clients from across the insurance spectrum. Nicky has supported clients with underwriting, annuity pricing and product development as well as internal model calibration to fulfil regulatory requirement.

Nicky’s background includes a long career in the UK National Health Service, firstly in intensive care, and latterly in Public Health.

• Nicky is an affiliate member of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, (IFoA) and is a member of the IFoA Health and Care Board.

Her previous roles within the IFoA have included:

• chair of the IFoA diabetes working party and chair of the associated steering group to oversee an external research project
• co-chair and member of the COVID-19 Actuarial Response Group (ARG)  https://www.covid-arg.com/
• deputy chair of the IFoA antimicrobial resistance working party

Nicky has presented on numerous occasions at industry conferences usually related to providing medical insights to insurers and actuaries.

In her spare time Nicky enjoys training for and participating in various physical endurance events.