Public Health, Policy & Systems
The University of Liverpool
L69 3GL
orcid.org/0000-0003-0354-8461
olly.butters@liverpool.ac.uk
github.com/OllyButters
@DrOllyButters

Dr. Oliver Butters

Ph.D. M.Sci. (Hons) ARCS

CAREER OVERVIEW


I have a strong interdisciplinary data science background, with a core focus on health and health related data. This has included roles driving the analysis of routinely collected linked healthcare data; leading the collection, processing and dissemination of birth cohort data; managing teams of data scientists and software engineers; and developing research software to unlock the potential of health data. A common thread to these roles is the need to ensure data is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Despite holding non-academic (professional services and Research Software Engineer) positions in my career I have a competitive publication record (30+ publications, h-index of 18) and a have successfully secured research funding.


QUALIFICATIONS


October 2005 to October 2009
Department of Physics and Astronomy
The Open University
Ph.D. in astrophysics at the Open University.

Unveiling the nature of Intermediate Polars through multiwavelength observations and computer modelling - I investigated the nature of the magnetic field in intermediate polars by carrying out X-ray satellite and ground-based optical circular polarization observations. I also built a simulation of the accretion flow in intermediate polars to model the emission and absorption processes.


September 2001 to June 2005
Department of Physics
Imperial College London
M.Sci. in Physics at Imperial College London. Final degree class 1:1

The syllabus followed a compulsory selection in the first year with ever increasing choice in the later years. A significant amount of project work was undertaken with much emphasis on computer modelling. My final year research project was a computer model simulating LeSage Gravity in Dusty Plasmas.


EMPLOYMENT HISTORY


June 2020 - present
Research Project Specialist
Public Health, Policy & Systems
The University of Liverpool

I work in the department of Public Health, Policy & Systems at the University of Liverpool where I have leadership roles in a number of projects, including the NIHR ARC NWC, HDRUK-North, System-P and GroundsWell. In the ARC NWC the focus is on health inequalities in the region. The HDRUK-North project is building a risk prediction model based on the use of anticholinergic medications. System-P is working towards developing actionable analytics in healthcare for the region. GroundsWell aims to understand the impact urban green and blue space has on health and well being. A common element in these projects is the use of routinely collected linked data to inform policy and practice.


April 2017 - May 2020
Senior Research Associate
Population Health Sciences Institute
Newcastle University

I was a senior research associate in the Data to Knowledge research group based at Newcastle University. In this role I led key components of multiple projects, all of which have a central goal to make it easier to do research with sensitive data and increase the impact from the data. These projects include a publications meta data mining project which aimed to evaluate and compare the research outputs of birth cohort studies in the UK, for which I was the Co-PI. I was responsible for developing mechanisms to securely extract and link genetics data for the 1958 birth cohort study, then delivering the data to external researchers. I was additionally centrally involved in the Connected Health Cities project, which aimed to join up data in the region and build a Trusted Research Environment in which health data can be deposited. Alongside these I sat as a member of the METADAC (www.metadac.ac.uk) where I assessed the suitability of data access requests and I was the technical lead for the international DataSHIELD project (www.datashield.ac.uk).


October 2013 to April 2017
ALSPAC Senior Data Manager
School of Social and Community Medicine
The University of Bristol

I was the senior data manager of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC - www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac). In this role I built, and maintained funding for, a successful team of 10+ members, to look after the data and the infrastructure needed to maintain the ALSPAC birth cohort. This involved curating over twenty five years of data, whilst facilitating the collection and processing of new data. The data was in a wide variety of formats and sizes, and included questionnaires, clinical assessments, biological samples and genetic data. All of this data had to be ingested into the main resource and made available to researchers in a timely fashion.

Information security was an essential part of this role, and I designed and implemented various systems and procedures to both monitor and fix problems. Much of this was done under the banner of ISO27001 and the NHS Information Governance Toolkit.

As part of this role I was actively engaged with the CLOSER consortium, and worked with other data managers to share good practice. I was also successful in applying to CLOSER for over £160,000 in grants for two projects.


November 2008 to September 2013
Research Associate

BRISSKit (October 2011 to September 2013)
Research computing support & Department of Health Sciences

As part of the Research Computing Support group I worked on a project called BRISSKit (Biomedical Research Infrastructure Software Service Kit). In this position I was the lead developer, driving the technical direction of the project. It was an ambitious bioinformatics infrastructure project in partnership with University Hospitals Leicester Trust to bring together a suite of programs to form a cloud-based platform that researchers could quickly and easily implement. A key component I architected was the overall cloud infrastructure which had >100 virtual machines. This was done in a VMWare environment alongside the puppet management software.


HALOGEN (April 2011 to September 2011)
Research computing support

I worked in the Research Computing Support group (part of I.T. Services) on a geospatial project called HALOGEN. This was a cross-disciplinary collaboration aiming to develop generic data management tools for geospatial researchers across the university. By developing a set of core standards I was able to ingest several disparate data sets in various formats into one homogeneous database. I then developed a web interface to the data so researchers could query the data in a way previously not available to them. By granting access to the database to geospatial analysis tools this allowed complex cross-data set (and hence cross-disciplinary) queries. This has led to new, and hitherto impossible, research questions being addressed.


WASP/LEDAS (November 2008 to March 2011)
Department of Physics and Astronomy

I was a research associate/support scientist in the physics and astronomy department. My position was split into three distinct roles, the majority share of my time spent on the SuperWASP project. This involved designing and building the public archive, which made over 20TB of astronomical data (over 100 billion data points) publicly available. The second part of the job was maintaining and developing the astronomical database service LEDAS. This is the main European portal to the World's astronomical data. The final aspect of my job was the continuation of my personal research into intermediate polars.


November 2006 - July 2009
Core team member
Department of Education
The Open University & Second Life

I was part of a research initiative aiming to explore virtual learning environments by using the virtual world of Second Life. The project (Schome) was housed on a private virtual island. I had several roles within the project - creating interactive objects on the island and data collection/analysis tools to evaluate the pilot. I was also involved in a project in which the community developed an instrument to go on a satellite and launched into space for a national competition. We were shortlisted and our project was developed further with the help of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.


July to September 2004
Undergraduate placement
Physics Department, Imperial College London

I was competitively selected to undertake an undergraduate research opportunity program placement in which I worked in the Plasma Physics research group in my department. During this time I constructed a two-dimensional simulation of homogeneous dust immersed in a low temperature plasma. The aim of this being to build a flexible framework for later development in my M.Sci. research project.


GRANTS, AWARDS AND ACCOLADES


Grants


Awards and Accolades


RESEARCH OUTPUTS


Publications

I have over 30 published journal articles in subjects covering astronomy, pedagogy, data archiving, social science, data governance and health data infrastructure. I have over 1500 citations with an h-index of 18 and an i10-index of 25. Selected highlights include:

Software


Data


COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT


Invited talks


Appointments, Memberships and Responsibilities


SKILLS AND PROFESSIONAL TRAINING


I.T.


Professional training


Teaching





Last updated on the 20th October 2022 by Olly.