Richard Hobbs is Nuffield Professor of Primary Care at the University of Oxford, Pro-Vice Chancellor, and Head of the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. He has served a decade as National Director of the National Institute for Health Research’s School for Primary Care Research and was Director of the NHS Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) Review panel from 2005-09. He has served many national and international scientific and research funding boards in UK, Ireland, Canada, and WHO, including the BHF Council, British Primary Care Cardiovascular Society, and the ESC Council for Cardiovascular Primary Care. He currently chairs the European Primary Care Cardiovascular Society, a WONCA Special Interest Group.
He is one of the world’s leading academics in primary care, and has developed at Oxford one of the largest and most highly ranked centre for academic primary care globally. He has also made major contributions to growing primary care academic capacity, in terms of people development and research networks. A highly cited primary care clinical scientist, he has authored over 450 peer reviewed publications, has an h-index of 90, with over 63000 citations (36000 since 2013) and 81 papers cited over 100 times, 14 papers cited over 1000 times and 7 papers with over 2000 citations. He has an outstanding track record in cardiovascular research, delivering trials that changed international guidelines and practice, especially in the areas of stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation (BAFTA, SAFE, and SMART trials), heart failure burden and diagnosis (ECHOES and REFER trials), and hypertension self-management (TASMINH 1-5). He currently leads the creation of a new Institute of Applied Digital Science at Oxford, leading a team of 8 internationally leading PIs and their multi-disciplinary teams in real-time disease surveillance, cohort linkage studies, validated risk scores and clinical decision rules, pharmaco-epidemiology, digitally-enabled patient self-management, practice performance dashboards and prescribing e-interventions, and a novel pragmatic digital trial platform based on the ORCHID platform.
He is only the fifth recipient of the RCGP Discovery Prize in 2018 (occasional awards since 1953), received an inaugural Distinguished Researcher Shine Prize and Best Presentation Prize at WONCA World Congress in 2018, and awarded a CBE for services to medical research in the 2018 New Year’s Honours.