Professor Sir Rory Collins
Colleges
Websites
-
UK Biobank
Principal Investigator and Chief Execuitve
-
British Heart Foundation
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
Rory Collins
FMedSci, FRCP
Head of Nuffield Department of Population Health and BHF Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
Rory Collins studied Medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, London University (1974-1980), and Statistics at George Washington University (1976-7) and at Oxford University (1982-3).
In 1985 he became co-director, with Professor Sir Richard Peto, of the University of Oxford's Clinical Trial Service Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU). In 1996, he was appointed Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Oxford, supported by the British Heart Foundation.
He became Principal Investigator and Chief Executive of the UK Biobank prospective study of 500,000 people in September 2005. From July 2013, he became the Head of the Nuffield Department of Population Health at Oxford University.
His work has been in the establishment of large-scale epidemiological studies of the causes, prevention and treatment of heart attacks, other vascular disease, and cancer. He was knighted in 2011 for his services to science.
Recent publications
Rare coding variants in CHRNB3 associate with reduced daily cigarette smoking across ancestries.
Journal article
Rajagopal VM. et al, (2026), Nat Commun, 17
Kidney function and mortality in Mexico: prospective study of 130 000 adults
Journal article
Aguilar Ramirez D. et al, (2026), Kidney Medicine
ssessment of adverse effects attributed to statin therapy in product labels: a meta-analysis of double-blind randomised controlled trials.
Journal article
Cholesterol Treatment Trialists' (CTT) Collaboration. Electronic address: ctt@ndph.ox.ac.uk . and Cholesterol Treatment Trialists' (CTT) Collaboration ., (2026), Lancet
UK Biobank: Transforming drug discovery and precision medicine.
Journal article
Bešević J. et al, (2026), Br J Pharmacol, 183, 234 - 248
Patterns and correlates of visual impairment and ocular hypertension among older adults in the general Chinese population: results from the CKB Biobank.
Journal article
Shao Z. et al, (2025), Br J Ophthalmol, 110, 107 - 116
