Dr Frances Rawle is Director of Policy, Ethics and Governance at the Medical Research Council. In this role she is responsible for governance and accountability for the MRC within UK Research and Innovation, including supporting the MRC’s Council, and for responding to and shaping the changing regulatory and policy environment relating to medical research. This includes development and implementation of policies in areas such as good research practice, research integrity, data sharing and transparency, open access publishing, research using personal data and research involving animals. She also has responsibility for research ethics and leads the MRC’s work aimed at improving reproducibility in biomedical research.
Frances has a PhD in immunology and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the UK and the USA before joining the MRC as a programme manager for AIDS research in 1991. Since then she has had various roles at the MRC, including programme manager for public health, leading the early planning stages of UK Biobank, head of the Research Careers group and leading the Molecular and Cellular Medicine group. In her spare time, she is chair of governors at a primary school.