Dr Eva Loucaides

Neonatal Registrar (ST6) / Academic Clinical Lecturer, St George’s University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust / City St George’s University of London

Eva is a paediatric registrar in London and a Clinical Lecturer at City St George’s University of London. She has always been research active having completed a pre-medicine PhD, an Academic Foundation Programme and an Academic Clinical Fellowship. She is passionate about global child health and has worked on research projects in the UK and Africa with a focus on newborns and survivors of neonatal pathologies. Eva champions research skills and research involvement for all resident paediatricians: she co-chaired the academic subgroup of the London School of Paediatrics Trainees Committee, founded the London based resident-led research network REACH (Research, Evaluation and Audit for Child Health) and is a member of the RCPCH TRN group.

Dr Thomas Isaac

Neonatal Registrar, St Michaels Hills Hospital

Tommy has fostered an interest in research throughout his training despite not holding formal academic positions. He is passionate about improving neurodevelopmental outcomes for children treated in neonatal units through simple modifications to care during their perinatal journey. He has been published on low-cost techniques to optimise cord management in preterm births via C-section, now rolled out across the Southwest - a review of what parents want from NICU care commissioned by WHO for its handbook on preterm care, and a study on the interplay between prematurity and deprivation and their impact on learning difficulties using a national dataset. He was the inaugural winner of the RCPCH Williams Cooper Bursary for best scientific paper on learning disability.

Dr Anne-Lise Goddings

Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer, Imperial College London

Dr Anne-Lise Goddings combines clinical general paediatric and adolescent medicine with her research focused on understanding how the adolescent brain develops, how this relates to changing behaviours and how this impacts on managing the healthcare needs of young people. Dr Goddings has more than 30 peer reviewed publications and is the Principal Investigator on an MRC grant developing a new puberty assessment tool for young people (PuBODY). She is the research lead for the RCPCH Young People’s Health special interest group and has sat on the Scientific committee of previous national conferences focussed on young people’s health.

Prof Paul Dimitri

Vice President for Science and Research, RCPCH

Paul currently works at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust as a Consultant in Paediatric Endocrinology and the Clinical Director of Innovation and Child Health Technology. He has worked in paediatrics since 1998 and specialised in paediatric
endocrinology since 2004. Paul leads the Hypothalamic and Pituitary Tumour Service at Sheffield Children’s Hospital and co-leads the Paediatric Late Effects Endocrinology service, supporting childhood cancer survivors with hormonal complications. He is Professor of Child Health Technology at the University of Sheffield, and Professor of Child Health at Sheffield Hallam University. Paul is Vice President for Science and Research at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and Director of the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Paediatrics and Child Health. He was the NIHR
National Children’s Specialty Lead from 2016-2024 during which time he strategically led NIHR children’s research and supported 15 Local Clinical Research Networks.

For over a decade, Paul has led on the development and implementation of national technology networks that focus on the development and adoption of technology for paediatrics and child health through private and public sector collaboration. In addition to being the Director of the NIHR HRC in Paediatrics and Child Health, Paul also serves as the Clinical Lead for the National TITCH (Technology Innovation Transforming Child Health) Network, and
was the Director of the NIHR Children and Young People MedTech Cooperative from 2018 to 2024, supporting the development and adoption of child health technology.

Prof Bob Phillips

Professor of Paediatrics and Evidence Synthesis, Consultant Paediatric Oncologist, Candlelighters Supportive Care Research Centre, Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, University of York

Bob is a Professor of Paediatrics and Evidence Synthesis at the Centre for Reviews and Disseminiation at the University of York and Hull/York Medical School, and an Honorary Consultant in Paediatric / Teenage-Young Adult Oncology at Leeds Children's Hospital.

He is also the Director of Candlelighters Supportive Care Research Centre, where his main areas of work are in the development of supportive care for children with cancer, individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis, and the development of skills in appraisal and translation of clinical research in practice. He is the lead of the PICNICC collaboration, "Predicting Infectious ComplicatioNs In Children with Cancer" which was formed by engaging clinical and methodological experts from 22 different study groups from 15 countries, parent representatives and healthcare researchers to investigate patterns of risk in febrile neutropenia.

Bob has worked extensively to promote and teach evidence-based practice with the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine in Oxford, UK, and also the Centre for Evidence-based Child Health (Institute of Child Health, London, UK). He edits the evidence-based practice sections of the Archives of Diseases in Childhood, and is an associate editor of the journal. He has lectured in the UK, Europe, North America, Australia and the Nordic Countries on the subject of evidence-based practice, and has written widely on this.

Dr Olivia Swann

Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases and Senior Clinical Fellow, Usher Institute and Royal Hospital for Children and Young People, Edinburgh

Dr Olivia Swann (Livvy) is an Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases and data scientist at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on improving child health and reducing health inequalities. Her previous work has influenced national and international policy around children and covid and has been presented to the Scottish and UK governments and the World Health Organisation. She is also a passionate advocate for encouraging women and girls into data science.

Livvy has recently been awarded a 5-year Wellcome Trust fellowship to set up the Homes, Heat and Healthy Kids Study. This major new study is investigating the role of cold, damp homes and respiratory infections in preschool children as well as exploring how do different ways of making a home warmer affect the risk of these infections. Her work is bringing together a wide variety of datasets together across Scotland including healthcare, housing, energy use, air pollution and climate, looking at the whole of Scotland over the past 15 years.

Dr Nick Brown

Teacher; Archives of Disease in Childhood, Uppsala University, Aga Khan University

Dr. Nick Brown is a clinical paediatrician with expertise in acute paediatrics, infectious diseases, and cardiology, as well as a clinical epidemiologist. He holds a PhD in pneumonia epidemiology in Low and Middle Income Countries. He has been involved in International Child Health for 30 years, with a focus on nutrition, infectious disease, neonatology, and oncology, and has spent 20 years working academically as an epidemiologist. He holds affiliations with Uppsala University, Sweden, and Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, and Kenya. He has previously worked in Sudan, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, and India. Since 2017, he has been Editor in Chief of the international academic journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Dr Phil Peacock

Consultant in Paediatric Emergency Medicine, Great Western Hospital

Phil is a paediatric emergency physician and enjoys helping fellow clinicians to better understand statistics, engage with clinical research, and practice evidence-based medicine. He is co-author of the Oxford Handbook of Medical Statistics. When not at work, he can often be found at the local climbing wall or going for a walk in the countryside.

Prof Will Carroll

Joint Officer for Research, RCPCH

Professor Carroll is an experienced researcher who has worked predominantly outside the traditional academic pathways. He believes that everyone working in child health has a responsibility to help deliver and implement research for the benefit of their patients. Put simply, we need more research, in more places including more children.

Prof Michelle Heys

Professor of Global Child Health, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health

Michelle Heys is a general and community paediatrician, mixed-methods implementation scientist, and public-health physician trained in both the UK, Australia and Hong Kong. She works full time (after years of less-than-full-time juggling of clinical work, public health training, research and parenting). Clinically, she currently supports the Motor Disorder Service in Newham, East London, embedding research into everyday clinical care — particularly in community settings where this is so often missing.

An NIHR Research Professor — one of the UK’s most prestigious clinical academic awards — Michelle leads a programme focused on health systems strengthening and equity for babies, children and families facing structural exclusion. She has secured over £15 million in competitive funding from NIHR, Wellcome, FCDO, UNICEF, and others.

Michelle co-leads two flagship digital health innovations: Neotree, a learning health system transforming newborn care in low-resource settings, and CHATA, a technology-assisted autism assessment tool. She is also co-lead of AEGIS (Advancing Equity for Children and Young People Seeking Asylum and Refuge), a transdisciplinary NIHR-funded programme co-developing interventions and policy recommendations with and for asylum-seeking children, young people, and their families across the UK.

As Chair of the BACCH Strategic Research Group, she mentors early-career community child health clinicians and champions inclusive, and champions non-linear career journeys, showing that curiosity, compassion and systems thinking can coexist with rigour and impact. Her guiding conviction is simple: every child deserves care that is informed by the best evidence — and every clinician, whatever their starting point, can help make that a reality.