Dr Alan Davies

Senior Lecturer Health Data Science

University of Manchester

Biography

I have a background in Computer Science and Nursing and have worked previously in interventional cardiology and subsequently authored several medical text books on electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation. I also have experience working as a software engineer/app developer in industry. I completed my PhD in Computer Science using eye-tracking and computational techniques to examine how practitioners interpret ECGs. Since then I have worked at the University of Manchester as a Data Scientist/Research Software Engineer before becoming a senior lecturer of Health Data Science in the Faculty of Biology Medicine and Health. My research interests include the application of technology to healthcare, how patients understand medical information and health related mobile application interventions.

British Computer Society (BCS) Professional member (MBCS)
Senior Fellow Advance HE (SFHEA)
Associate member Faculty of Clinical Informatics (FCI)
Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society
Committee member University Research Ethics Committee (UREC)
Former Data Science Fellow AstraZeneca

Interests

Data science
Mobile/digital health interventions
Personal health tracking
Cardiology (ECGs)
Eye-tracking
Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Education

PhD in Computer Science

University of Manchester
PGCert in Higher Education

University of Manchester
BSc (HONS) RN in Nursing Science

Birmingham City University

Skills

R

Python

Data Science

Statistics, Machine learning, Databases

Software engineering

C/C++, Java, COBOL, VB, LiveCode, Agile, Git, co-design, prototyping, requirements gathering

Research

Experimental design, computational methods, qualitative/quantitative analysis, visualisations, health informatatics, UX/HCI, eye-tracking

App development

Hybrid (Cordova, Ionic), Native (Objective-C, Java)

Web development

Front end (HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Bootstrap), Back end (Python Flask, Django)

Medical

Nursing science, ECG interpretation, interoperability, cardiac angiography, author of 2 medical textbooks

Awards

Best research poster (2015) - Manchester University. Inaugural Healthcare Awards best student adult branch (2007) - Birmingham City University.

Projects

DART-Ed co-design of capability framework for AI & Digital Healthcare

Health Education England (HEE) Mar 2021 – Sep 2021

Academic partner to HEE involved in the co-design and construction of a capability framework around AI & Digital Healthcare.

PGCert Clinical Data Science

University of Manchester, Health Education England (HEE) and the National School of Healthcare Science Jan 2021 – Jan 2023

Programme director. Involved in co-design of a educational programme to train the healthcare workforce in data science

Topol Programme for Digital Fellowships in Healthcare Machine Learning workshop

Health Education England, National School of Healthcare Science and the University of Manchester Mar 2020 – Mar 2020

Delivery of a Macine Learning workshop with hands on practice via Jupyter notebooks.

Development of a core competency framework for Clinical Informatics

Faculty of Clinical Informatics (FCI) and the University of Manchester Nov 2019 – May 2020

Delivery of a core competency framework for clinical informaticians.

Genetic Mobile App (working title)

Manchester University NHS FT and Blackburn with Darwen Council Jun 2019 – Dec 2020

Development of a Genetic Counselling App to raise genetic literacy in South-Asian communities

Healthy Lifestyles App

Nightingale Centre (Wythenshawe Hospital) and the University of Manchester Mar 2019 – Dec 2020

A co-designed app to promote healthy living for women aged 18-35 with a higher risk of breast cancer.

Developing Medical Apps and mHealth Interventions: A guide for Researchers, Physicians and Informaticians

Springer Feb 2019 – Jan 2020

A book detailing the process of creating and developing and evaluating medical apps and mHealth applications.

Leveraging Data Visualisation to Enhance Lay Peoples Perception of Non-trivial Patterns in Electrocardiograms

University of Manchester May 2018

Contributor to a project aimed at evaluating the use of data visualisation techniques for improving lay people perception of life-threatening patterns in ECG like a prolonged QT-interval and abnormal ST-T morphology in an intuitive manner.

Perception-Based Decision Support for Medical Image Analysis (PerMIA)

Data Science Institute Jun 2017

A project to examine the combination of data streams (EEG and eye-tracking) to examine expertise in radiology.

Smart cities demonstrator

CityVerve Jun 2017

Co-designed a prototype mobile app with COPD patients to collect self-reported effect of symptoms with experience sampling.

Biomarker visualisation for clinical trial decision making

AstraZeneca May 2017 – Jun 2019

Carrying out research into the use of biomarker visualisation in clninical trials for decision making tasks.

GazeMod

University of Manchester Jan 2014 – Dec 2018

The Gaze Modelling for Time Series Medical Data (GazeMod) ECG project is a project aimed at presenting computational models of visual cognition that are derived from eye-tracking data. The data is recorded from medical experts viewing and interpreting electrocardiograms (ECGs).