Professor Levy is Appointed as the New Associate Dean of the NIHR Academy

Professor Jeremy Levy has been appointed as the Associate Dean of the NIHR Academy (Integrated Pathways). He will focus on developing academic career pathway opportunities for clinical and practitioner professions. This includes doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists and allied health professionals.

Jeremy is a Consultant Nephrologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and serves as director of clinical academic training for Imperial College London. In his clinical work, he has major interests in chronic kidney disease working across primary and secondary care, glomerulonephritis and immune-mediated renal disease. He has led developments in clinical academic training in a collaborative approach with people from various professional backgrounds at Imperial College and across London for over 15 years.

He will begin his role in September, which is for 3 years initially. He is replacing Professor Lorraine Harper, who finishes her tenure at the end of September.

Professor Waljit Dhillo, Dean of NIHR Academy, said: “I’m really pleased to welcome Jeremy as Associate Dean of the NIHR Academy. He is an outstanding clinical academic who will bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to build on the excellent work of Professor Lorraine Harper, whom I would like to thank immensely for her hard work and dedication to supporting clinical academic careers in the role since 2019.

“The Associate Deans play a key leadership role in supporting and improving NIHR’s training and career development pipeline. I look forward to working with Jeremy as we further develop NIHR’s opportunities and activities to grow the clinical academic workforce.”

Jeremy added, “I am really excited to be taking on this role and building on the fantastic work done by Professor Harper. I have worked with the NIHR Academy for several years and have always been so impressed by its support and leadership of clinical academic training and am thrilled I can now help develop this programme.

“Clinical academic careers across all healthcare professions need maximal support, and I hope I can enhance the NIHR offering, cement and expand its range of work, and reach out across the country to help anyone trying to develop their research careers while continuing patient care.”

Providing leadership and building research capacity

The Associate Dean for Integrated Pathways will provide leadership for building clinical and practitioner academic capacity across the full breadth of health and care settings. This includes local authorities, community and hospital settings.

The role includes:

engaging stakeholders and professional bodies
ensuring NIHR research training programmes are of the highest quality
contributing to NIHR’s strategic planning
providing leadership to NIHR Integrated Academic Training Leads and NIHR Academy Members
promoting equitable and inclusive practices
embedding and championing the principles of equality, diversity and inclusion

Jeremy will support the senior leadership team in the NIHR Academy to ensure the research training programmes are of the highest quality. He will work alongside G.J. Melendez-Torres, Associate Dean for Researcher Inclusion and Wendy Baird, Associate Dean for Infrastructure and Capacity Building Structures.

Role will support the government’s 10 Year Health Plan

The 10 Year Health Plan for England was published in July. It aims to strengthen the commitment to embed research as a core part of high-quality healthcare, making it accessible to all.

This role will help support the plan by building research workforce capacity and capability for clinicians and practitioners to develop careers in research. In particular, it will grow research capacity in underrepresented professions key in the long-term plan.

This includes dentists, pharmacists, nurses, allied health professionals, midwives, and public health and social care practitioner academics. Professor Dhillo outlines how NIHR can support career paths for researchers from all backgrounds and professions in a blog.

NIHR has a key role in the ambition of the plan to make research a core part of everyday clinical work. Find out more about how NIHR will support the plan.