Julia qualified with distinction from Sheffield University Medical School in 1989 where she was awarded the Prize in Medicine, Surgery, General Practice and Obstetrics and Gynaecology. In 1995 she was awarded a distinction in the MRCGP examination and awarded FRCGP in 2005. She became a Member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1994, and a Fellow in 2013. She was appointed as Lecturer at the University of Nottingham in 1995, Senior Lecturer in 1999, Reader in 2004. She was promoted to Professor of Clinical Epidemiology & General Practice in 2005 where she stayed until her appointment at the University of Oxford.

Julia’s research interests are very broad and include large scale clinical epidemiology, drug safety and the development of risk prediction algorithms using electronic databases from general practices. She is the co-founder of the QResearch database (www.qresearch.org) which is one of the largest clinical research databases worldwide. Since 2012, it has doubled in size to over 30 million patient records and is also linked to hospital, mortality & cancer data. She has developed and validated risk prediction algorithms for a range of diseases including cardiovascular disease, cancer fracture, diabetes and other conditions. These tools are now widely used across the NHS.