speakers

Dr Alicia White

Alicia's background is in genetics and she was a postdoctoral researcher at University College London before joining Bazian,where she is a Health Research Analyst Manager. She and the Research Analyst team are responsible for the critical appraisal of studies for Behind the Headlines.

The Behind the Headlines service has covered over 1,300 healthcare stories in the news to date, and won the BMJ Group award for Best Innovation in Medical Communication 2009.

Bazian
Behind the Headlines

Andrew Garratt

Andrew is the press and public affairs officer for the Royal Statistical Society. He is an astrophysics graduate who slipped into first political campaigning (working along the way for various MPs) and then into public relations.

All his PR training has come 'on the job'. When not working to promote statistics Andrew regularly puts his statistical understanding of risk into practice by going rock-climbing.

Andrew Jennings

Andrew is a journalist, writer and film maker. He has worked for Sunday Times Insight, World In Action, Panorama, CBS Sixty Minutes and other UK and foreign networks and publications.

He has published five books ranging from corruption at Scotland Yard to racketeering at the IOC and FIFA. He has reported from Beirut, Palermo, Nicaragua, Chechnya and other places long bombed and forgotten.

He is currently the only reporter in the world banned by FIFA's Sepp Blatter - for revealing in 2003 the president's secret bonuses.

He lectures at universities about corruption, how to obtain confidential documents and report their contents with a joyous heart.

Andy Rowell

Andy is a freelance writer and investigative journalist specialising in environmental issues. He has written about climate change and global warming sceptics for over fifteen years and his books include: The Next Gulf: London, Washington and Oil Conflict in Nigeria, 2005, and Green Backlash – Global Subversion of the Environment Government, 1996.

He is a director of the non-profit company Public Interest Investigations that runs SpinWatch.

Ben Goldacre

Ben is a doctor and science writer who has written the Bad Science column in the Guardian since 2003.

His work focuses on unpicking the evidence behind misleading claims from journalists, the pharmaceutical industry, alternative therapists and government reports.

He has made a number of documentaries for BBC Radio 4, and his book Bad Science reached number one in the non-fiction charts, having sold over 240,000 copies in the UK. It is currently being translated into 17 languages.

Bad Science

Connie St Louis

Connie is the director of the MA in Science Journalism at City University, London. She is also an award-winning freelance broadcaster, science journalist, writer and scientist.

She presents and produces a range of science and health programmes for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. She is a recipient of the prestigious Joseph Rowntree Journalist Fellowship.

Her most recent programme on BBC Radio 4 which she produced and presented, investigated the use of racially targeted designer drugs by pharmaceutical companies. She also presented the landmark Radio 4 series ‘Life as’ which charted the science of life before birth until death.

Cynthia has worked in the media for over a decade on a range of projects in print, documentary film, radio and interactive.

Until recently she was Deputy Interactive Editor at the Financial Times where she researched and produced multimedia features and data visualisations.

In her current position as investigative reporter, also at the FT, she uses her data analysis and computer-assisted reporting skills to produce stories across a variety of beats, both financial and non-financial.

David Donald

David is the data editor at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington. His current interests include financial, housing, and healthcare analysis and new tools for data analysis.

Prior to joining the Center in 2008, Donald served as training director at Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting for five years.

He focuses on data analysis to uncover fraud and governmental abuse. His stories have won three Batten Awards and two Hammet Awards for ethical and courageous journalism.

David McCandless

David is an author, data-journalist and information designer, working across print, advertising, TV and web. His work has appeared internationally in over forty publications including The Guardian, Wired and Die Zeit.

Recently, he has championed the use of infographics and data visualisation to explore new directions for journalism and design - and to find stories in the seas of data swamping us.

His blog and book Information is Beautiful are dedicated to visualising ideas, knowledge, data - with the minimum use of text.

Information is Beautiful

David Leigh

David is a journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. He is The Guardian's Investigations Editor and is one of the UK’s best-known investigative journalists.

He investigated BAE systems, revealing that the arms company paid £1bn to Saudi prince Bandar. After being the subject of criminal inquiries in the US, BAE has now admitted crimes connected to arms sales to Saudi Arabia, central Europe and Tanzania, and is to pay fines totaling $400m in the US and £30m in the UK.

Prof Doug Altman

Doug has been director at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine in Oxford since its inception in 1995 and has directed the Medical Statistics Group of Cancer Research UK since 1988. He previously worked for the Medical Research Council for 11 years.

He is author of Practical Statistics for Medical Research, co-editor of Statistics with Confidence, and Systematic Reviews in Health Care. He has published over 400 peer reviewed articles, many aimed at clarifying statistical ideas for medical researchers including the long-running Statistics Notes series in the BMJ jointly with Martin Bland.

Elena Egawhary

Elena is a freelance journalist and researcher. An official cij computer assisted reporting trainer, she has used Excel and Access in investigative journalism for several years.

Elena has written for the New Statesman, The Guardian, The Independent and Legal Business Magazine. Elena is currently working for BBC Panorama.

Elena’s skills in Excel enabled her to discover that Ofsted's child protection inspection regime had been relying on inaccurate data provided by Haringey Council, and was not providing a reliable picture of the state of child protection services across the country.

Harold Bolter

Harold's working life began as an apprentice journalist with the Birmingham Post. He progressed from general reporter to industrial editor of the paper, before joining the Financial Times.

In 1975 he was recruited by British Nuclear Fuels to be their Director of Information, at a time when the nuclear industry desperately needed a PR makeover. He rose to be BNFL's Company Secretary and Main Board Director, before resigning in 1993.

His book Inside Sellafield was published in 1996 to critical acclaim, and was the basis of several tv programmes on nuclear power industry.

James Ball

James is the development producer for the Bureau for Investigative Journalism and oversees their web presence. He was previously chief reporter for food industry trade journal The Grocer, and has had work published in The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Independent on Sunday and the Guardian.

He has trained and given talks on the emerging field of data-driven journalism internationally and completed his postgraduate diploma in Investigative Journalism at City University in 2008.

jamesrb.co.uk

Jennifer LaFleur

Jennifer is the director for computer-assisted reporting at ProPublica. She was previously the computer-assisted reporting editor for The Dallas Morning News, where she worked on the investigative team.

She has directed CAR at the San Jose Mercury News and at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and was IRE's first training director.

She has won awards for her coverage of disability, legal and open government issues. Jennifer is the co-author of IRE's Mapping for Stories: A Computer-Assisted Reporting Guide.

Julian Todd

Julian is a British computer programmer and activist for freedom of information. He was inventor and co-founder of Public Whip and the affiliated TheyWorkForYou website, a project which parses raw Hansard data to track how members vote in the UK Parliament. He has since extended this concept of parsing political transcripts to the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations to establish UNdemocracy.com.

Julian developed the idea for ScraperWiki to try to address the issue of getting unstructured and hard to manage public data into a ‘structured’ and usable format and by adding spatial and temporal references. The objective is to make ScraperWiki the largest 'community supported' structured datastore in the world and which can be used by the media, universities, academics and commercial organistions.

Nigel Hawkes

Nigel is a science and health journalist. He graduated from Oxford with a degree in metallurgy in 1966, and has written about science, health and international affairs in a career that began on the staff of Nature and included long spells at The Observer (1972-90) and The Times (1990-2008).

He retired from The Times in 2008 after eight years as Health Editor, and is now a columnist for British Medical Journal and Director of a new pressure group, Straight Statistics, which campaigns for the honest presentation and use of statistical data by government, media, and others.

Paul Farrelly MP

Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, Paul is a member of the House of Commons Culture and served on the Media and Sport Select Committee since 2005.

He was recently an instigator of a report on 'Press Standards, Privacy and Libel' and parliamentary questions over Trafigura and super-injunctions.

He was the City Editor at The Observer from 1997 to 2001 and prior to this, worked for The Independent on Sunday and Reuters. He has a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

P. Sainath

P. Sainath is the Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, India. He has won over 35 global and national awards for his reporting (but has turned down others). His reporting on hunger, migrations, distress and farmer suicides, has played a key role in the development of public policy and government programmes in rural areas.

Since 2001, an exhibition of his photographs -Visible Work, Invisible Women: Women and Work in Rural India - has toured India and beyond. We hope to have this exhibition at the summer school.

Paul Moreira

Paul is a French investigative reporter and founder of Premières Lignes, a French independent television news agency producing investigative documentaries for French networks and international distribution. His investigative documentary "Iraq, a nation’s agony", received awards including best documentary at Monte Carlo's International Television Festival.

In 2009, he produced and directed "Afghanistan: On The Dollar Trail", the documentary received best investigative award at the FIGRA international film festival and was broadcast on networks in Europe, USA, Australia and Japan.

Philip Conway

Philip is a partner in leading London law firm Davenport Lyons. He has been specialising in defamation and privacy cases since 1986, representing the interests of the media both pre- and post- publication in print, and broadcasting.

Philip has acted for prominent individuals, politicians, actors, writers and entertainers in claims against publishers which has brought him into contact with most media organisations.
Over the last 15 years he has concentrated mainly on defendant work.

Philip has acted for many national newspapers although principally for the Express and Mirror titles. He is also an adviser to Centaur Media publishers on media issues, for titles including The Lawyer, Money Marketing, Mortgage Strategy and Marketing Week.

He sat on the Law Society Committee on Privacy and on the Law Society Committee on Defamation and has been involved in the drafting of the pre-action protocol for defamation.

Raj Bairoliya

Raj is a chartered accountant and senior managing director of FTI Forensic Accounting, part of FTI Consulting, Inc. The FTI forensic and litigation consulting practice provides independent advice and supports clients with services ranging from forensic accounting and electronic discovery to fraud investigations and is engaged in many high profile investigations.

FTI Consulting is retained by law firms, corporates as well law enforcement and regulatory agencies. Raj has specialised in forensic accounting investigations for over 20 years.

FTI Consulting

Rob Evans

Rob has won awards for his work both on corruption scandals and for promoting freedom of information. He has been a journalist with the Guardian newspaper since 1999 where he uses freedom of information laws to get stories for the paper.

His book - Gassed, British Chemical Warfare Experiments on Humans at Porton Down - was published in 2000. He has also worked for the Financial Times, the Sunday Telegraph and
television documentaries

Sally Gainsbury

Sally is Chief Reporter for the Health Service Journal and the Nursing Times. She has specialised in public policy and public finance reporting since 2005 when she started working for Public Finance magazine.

Her investigation uncovering how NHS hospitals were channelling money earned through treating private patients through third parities such as charities to circumvent a cap on their private work led to the foundation trust Monitor and the Department of Health being sanctioned through judicial review last year.

Health Service Journal (subscription only)

Dr Vivek Muthu

Vivek is cofounder and Chief Executive of Bazian, a company specialising in evidence based healthcare.

Vivek was part of the Bazian team that produced a rapid systematic review of the evidence regarding the purported link between the MMR vaccine and autism for the British Medical Association in response to the rising panic about the vaccine.

The review found no link between the vaccine and autism, and formed the basis for the BMA's media and public education campaign which Vivek and Dr Anna Donald, his Bazian cofounder, supported in the media.

Bazian
Behind the Headlines