Rory Collins studied Medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, London University (1974-1980), and Statistics at George Washington University (1976-7) and at Oxford University (1982-3).
In 1985 he became co-director, with Professor Sir Richard Peto, of the University of Oxford’s Clinical Trial Service Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU). In 1996, he was appointed Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Oxford, supported by the British Heart Foundation.
Rory became Principal Investigator and Chief Executive of the UK Biobank prospective study of 500,000 people in September 2005. In July 2013, he was appointed Head of the Nuffield Department of Population Health at Oxford University.
His work has been in the establishment of large-scale epidemiological studies of the causes, prevention and treatment of heart attacks, other vascular disease, and cancer. Rory was knighted in 2011 for his services to science.
