LIDA researcher awarded £2 million Wellcome Trust Fellowship to transform treatment evidence for people with cardiovascular disease and multiple long-term conditions

Dr Marlous Hall, Associate Professor and Lead of the Health Community at the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA), has been awarded a prestigious £2 million Career Development Award from the Wellcome Trust.

The fellowship, part of Wellcome’s flagship scheme supporting exceptional mid-career researchers with the potential to become international leaders, will fund Dr Hall’s eight-year programme of research aimed at improving treatment evidence for people living with multiple long-term conditions (multimorbidity).

Using population-scale health data and innovative analytical methods, Dr Hall’s research will seek to make clinical evidence more inclusive and equitable, tackling one of the most pressing challenges facing the NHS and health systems worldwide.

“The fellowship represents an incredibly exciting step in my career,” said Dr Hall. “Whilst I am thrilled to be getting stuck into this programme of work, I am most excited by the opportunity to increase research capacity across data science, epidemiology and health equity - and to invest significant time and effort into supporting the careers of others within a positive research environment.”

Addressing evidence gaps in clinical research

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the cornerstone of clinical guidelines, but they often exclude patients with multimorbidity, leaving major gaps in treatment evidence and contributing to health inequalities.

Dr Hall’s fellowship will tackle this challenge by applying novel methods to generate high-quality treatment evidence using population-scale healthcare data from across the UK.

The fellowship outputs will greatly help NHS decision making and has the potential for health policy impact by shaping the treatment evidence for specific groups of people with multiple long-term conditions.

Focus on heart attack as a model condition

The research will  focus on myocardial infarction (heart attack) - a condition where more than 60% of patients also live with multiple long-term conditions. Using innovative data science approaches such as target trial emulation and advanced causal inference, the project will generate evidence that better reflects the realities of real-world patient populations.

This work will not only help to inform more inclusive and equitable clinical guidelines but also establish a reproducible methodological framework that can be applied across a wide range of diseases.

Driving impact through data science and collaboration

Based in LIDA, Dr Hall’s fellowship will strengthen interdisciplinary links between data scientists, epidemiologists, and clinical researchers, ensuring that methods and findings translate directly into improved healthcare policy and practice. The fellowship also builds strong collaborative partnerships with a number of internationally esteemed colleagues with expertise in pharmacoepidemiology, health informatics, health economics and clinical cardiology including from the University of Leeds, University College London, University of Liverpool, University of Manchester and with colleagues from the West Yorkshire ICB.

The fellowship affords multiple training and mentoring opportunities for the postdoctoral research, research software engineering and patient and public co-ordinator roles which will be supported through this research. The ambition is for the research capacity building and increased development of local expertise in causal inference and target trial emulation to provide wider benefit for the LIDA Health Community and beyond.

Professor Chris Gale, Co-Director of LIDA and Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine (LICAMM) said, “We are absolutely delighted that Dr Hall has been awarded this prestigious Wellcome Trust Fellowship. Her research epitomises what LIDA stands for - using innovative data science and collaboration across disciplines to improve health outcomes for all. This fellowship not only reflects Marlous’s exceptional talent and commitment, but it will also help to build the next generation of researchers working at the intersection of data, health, and equity.”