James Smith

James is a meta-researcher interested in drug and device development. His ongoing projects include prediction of drug approval, improving tools for preclinical data analysis, and assessing COVID-19 trial characteristics (stage 1 registered report accepted protocol here). He is part of a pan-European team funded by the European Commission to investigate the clinical evidence supporting medical device use in Europe (CORE-MD). 

He is interested in open/reproducible science practices and is a Reproducible Research Oxford (RROX) Fellow.  He teaches a workshop on Open Science for Postgraduate students in NDORMS, has contributed to materials for an introductory course on simulations in R and is a Software Carpentries instructor. 

His MRC funded DPhil was titled “Patent Landscape Reporting Quality and Predicting Drug Approval”, in which he found evidence for poor reporting quality in patent landscapes and developed the reporting items for patent landscapes (RIPL) statement, a reporting guideline. Hoping to reduce the extremely high costs of drug development, he also developed a predictive model which aimed to predict market approval of small molecule compounds from the pre-clinical stage.

He was previously a Research Associate of the CASMI Translational Stem Cell Consortium, where worked on a variety of projects relating to advanced therapeutics, and was a SENS Research Foundation Summer Scholar at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. 

James has a first class undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford, where he was an academic scholar at Worcester College. He is actively involved in the Effective Altruism community and has been a facilitator on the EA in Depth Fellowship.

Please contact him if you want to discuss anything mentioned in this profile, or anything else.

Twitter: @JamesASmith92