Associates

At Minervation we work with a number of different associates to provide the best possible service to our clients.  We find that effective partnership working enables us to put together really effective project teams and it's also a lot of fun!

Our talented associates include:

Angela Roche

Angela set up Design By Day with a passion for collaboration and a means of providing a real alternative to larger design agencies.

Since Angela graduated from Salford University, with a 1st Class honours in graphic design in 2006, she has been working in the digital realm in web design, development and animation. She started out her career at Manchester agency Bubble, producing moving image based work and designing websites for clients such as Playstation, Wrangler, JD Sports and Urban Splash, before going it alone and working with organisations such as the NHS, Doctors Worldwide, Cornerhouse and the University of Leeds.

Angela has an affinity for all things digital, taking an imaginative and thoughtful approach to all projects, producing beautiful, relevant design with usability and accessibility in mind.

Angela is constantly seeking out new technologies and experiences, and exploring how these can be used in her work to the advantage of her clients.

Ross Chapman

Ross Chapman is an experienced web designer and digital video producer. He enjoys working with clients across a variety of industries, predominantly in the outdoor, leisure and health sectors. With a background in creating digital media for a commercial UK broadcaster, his expertise is broad, from creating websites, to videos and designing mobile interfaces.  He's passionate about creating simple digital solutions that meet real life communication problems.

Elizabeth Fairley

Dr Elizabeth Fairley has established her own scientific consultancy, EFB Services, and provides a comprehensive range of services to commercial, public sector and academic clients. Areas of expertise include systematic reviewing, critical appraisal, market research, validation, evaluation and quality assurance to enable product development and commercialisation. In addition to Minervation, clients include; Aridhia Informatics, Theia Bioscience, BlueVector, Digital Curation Centre, Department of Public Health (University of Aberdeen), ITI Life Sciences, Textensor and Scottish Intercollegiate Guideline Network (SIGN). Her goal is to deliver outstanding results to aid business development and productivity.

In the past, Elizabeth has worked for a commercial bioinformatics venture (Cognia EU) as Science Support Manager. Her responsibilities in this role included quality assurance of curated data, biological ontology and database analysis as part of developing text mining-assisted database curation business unit.

An undergraduate (BSc (Hons) in Genetics from Aberdeen University) and postgraduate education (Ph.D. in Biology from Cambridge University) has provided Elizabeth with an excellent understanding of the biomedical domain. Her successful research career at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the Wellcome Trust Centre of Cell Biology (University of Edinburgh) involved working on how mutations in nuclear envelope proteins alter genomic architecture and cell cycle dynamics and the regulation of mitotic proteins. Her main areas of interest are Cancer, Diabetes and Muscular dystrophy.

Julia Cartwright

Julia is a research psychologist and director of Flex Business Consulting Ltd. She is an experienced facilitator and coach and has an expert knowledge in patient information and health communications and has worked for a variety of clients in both the public and private sectors in addition to acting as a strategic advisor to HealthQWest Scotland.  She has also held research posts at The Picker Institute, The University of Oxford's Health Service Research Unit and Oxford Brookes University, where she continues to lecture on the Attitudes to Health & Illness module. Julia had a first career as an investment surveyor with a Merchant Bank.

Sally Crowe

Sally has a nursing and public health background. As director of Crowe Associates Ltd, which provides consultancy, training and project management for patient and public involvement in health, she regularly facilitates workshops and consultation events in health and social care research, and services development.  Teaching critical appraisal and understanding evidence skills continues to be a passion.  She has recently published a BMJ Wiley Blackwell Patient and Public Involvement Toolkit.

She chairs the James Lind Alliance Monitoring and Implementation Group, a national coalition that aims to tackle treatment uncertainties in health care.  This is primarily achieved through partnerships of patient and clinician groups, and Sally is currently working with partnerships for eczema, type 1 diabetes, pressure ulcers and pre term birth. The James Lind Alliance is funded by the Department of Health.

David Crowe

As a director of Crowe Associates Ltd David is an experienced and passionate Leader, with extensive experience of organisational development and change in both the private and public sector, both as an Operations Director within a business, and for over 10 years as a freelance Consultant.

David has project managed the successful development of a comprehensive training programme for the Social Care sector, LogontoCare which has involved the training on a range of topics (such as Dementia, Equality and Diversity) using E-learning and blended learning principles. This project won a national Skills for Care accolade in most innovate learning in 2006.

David's particular areas of specialism are:
•    Business planning, organisational development and change consultancy
•    Coaching and Mentoring
•    Facilitation and development of Leaders and Managers

Carl Heneghan

Carl Heneghan BA (Hons) Oxon, MRCGP has had an association with the  Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine since 1995. Currently holding a  Dept of Health Career Development Award, he is a General Practitioner  and a senior clinical research fellow in the Department of Primary  Care at Oxford University. He has considerable experience in teaching  for undergraduates, postgraduates and teachers of EBM practice. He has co-authored the EBM toolkit (BMJ), and is involved in work that  promotes the understanding and teaching of critical appraisal.

Carl is the cardiovascular lead within the Department and is currently a principal investigator in the new NIHR Centre for Monitoring of Chronic Disease in Primary Care. Within the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine Carl provides teaching, support and resources to individuals and groups to facilitate Evidence-Based Practice. The EBM group undertakes research that focuses on both the general issues of implementation of Evidence-Based Practice and also specific disease related issues. Research interests include the barriers to practicing Evidence-Based Medicine in practice. Currently Carl is lead applicant with Professor Paul Glasziou on a project looking at the utilization of research in primary care. In addition, Carl has research interest in improving the methods used in both primary and secondary research and has an interest in two areas of diagnosis and diagnostic test evaluation. 

Sue Lacey-Bryant

Passionate about improving the quality of health care and bringing knowledge to bear on decision-making, Sue has a unique understanding of the development and information needs of Clinical Commissioning Groups and primary care teams. She is one of the pioneers of practical approaches to knowledge management in the NHS, using ‘KM’ as an enabler of organisational development and improved quality, innovation, prevention and productivity.As programmer manager for Quality:UK, Sue led an ambitious programme funded by the Health Foundation, taking a whole system approach to quality improvement of healthcare across Milton Keynes. With a track record of aligning services to priorities and strengthening customer focus, and focused on service improvement to deliver high-quality, user-centered services that fully utilise the opportunities presented by IT, Sue managed a successful portfolio career as an information specialist through the 90s and naughties. Working within the public sector as well as with commercial clients such as Doctors.net.uk, she has wide experience of developing services, people and products.

Kay Renfrew

Kay is a freelance project manager.  After a short stint straight out of university as a management consultant, she moved into the pharmaceutical industry and developed a specialism in document management systems, before side-stepping into multimedia and becoming Director of Operations for a production company in Oxford. 

She now works freelance for a group of select clients managing IT, media and translation projects and has worked with a wide variety of companies including Vodafone, BMW, InterContinental Hotels Group and The Blue Cross.

Karla Soares-Weiser

Karla obtained her medical degree in 1987 in Brazil, and then completed a residency in psychiatry.  During 1992-1994 she completed a MA degree in psychiatric epidemiology, and between 1994 and 1997 a PhD in a programme supported jointly by the Universities of Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Oxford (England).  During that period she worked intensively with the Cochrane Collaboration.  She was also involved with the activities of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and participated in a series of courses organised by the Centre on methodological design and analysis of randomised trials.  In June 1997 she was awarded her Doctorate, with merit, and worked with the Brazilian Cochrane Centre (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and the Ibero-American Cochrane Centre (Barcelona, Spain), teaching and providing methodological support for reviewers.  At the end of 1998 she moved to Israel. She has continued to work closely with the Cochrane Collaboration, specifically with the UK Cochrane Centre (Oxford), where she has been a Visiting Fellow since 2000.  She also helped to organize the 15th Cochrane Colloquium, which took place in Sao Paulo in October 2007. Over the years, she has accumulated broad, hands-on experience relevant to the preparation of systematic reviews of intervention studies, and more recently, of screening and diagnosis studies. She currently manages a small company (Enhance Reviews) that undertakes research work in evidence-based health care.