Dr Thomas Cowling
BSc MPH PhD
Assistant Professor
in Clinical Epidemiology
LSHTM
Keppel Street
London
WC1E 7HT
United Kingdom
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Non-communicable Disease Epidemiology, Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health.
My current role is based in the Electronic Health Records (EHR) Research Group which I joined in November 2021. I work on COVID-19 projects as part of the OpenSAFELY collaboration with the Bennett Institute at the University of Oxford (see 'Research' below).
Before this, I was based in the Department of Health Services Research and Policy and completed a Medical Research Council (MRC) Skills Development Fellowship (2018-2021). This Fellowship focused on measures of patient morbidity and the prognosis of cancer patients, using national cancer and hospital data. I also worked on national NHS audits for colorectal and prostate cancer, in collaboration with the Royal College of Surgeons.
I joined LSHTM in 2017 from Imperial College London where I completed degrees in Biomedical Sciences (BSc), Public Health (MPH), and Health Services Research (PhD). My PhD investigated access to general practice services nationally and was funded by a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Doctoral Research Fellowship.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
MSc Health Data Science: I am part of the Programme Committee that leads this MSc. I am also a Module Organiser for the ‘Data Challenge’ module, a personal tutor, and a project supervisor.
MSc Public Health: I have taught on the Health Care Evaluation, Health Services, and Principles and Practice of Public Health modules of this MSc.
I currently supervise two PhD students:
- Jemma Boyle - Using national routine data to explore the utilisation and outcomes of multimodal treatment in the management of colorectal cancer
- Caroline Chesang - Estimating treatment effects using real world data when there are competing risks: applications to causes of death of prostate cancer patients
I have supervised two completed PhDs:
- Matthew Parry (2021) - Use of routinely collected hospital data to explore access to and outcomes from different radiotherapy treatment strategies for locally advanced prostate cancer
- David Wallace (2021) - Liver transplantation as treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma: a national study using linked electronic healthcare records
Current and prospective students are very welcome to contact me.
Research
My research currently focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19.
Working as part of the OpenSAFELY collaboration, I am examining which characteristics of individuals are associated with the symptoms experienced (if any) after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. This includes sociodemographic characteristics, pre-existing health conditions, host immunity, as well as characteristics of the infection (such as virus gene profile). To do this, I am using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) COVID-19 Infection Survey linked to general practice records and COVID-19 testing data.
My main methodological interest is how we should model patient morbidity in electronic healthcare records when large sample sizes are available. Larger samples may allow us to incorporate more information about each patient than is done by conventional methods. My work in this area has, so far, investigated approaches for selecting small sets of diagnosis codes from much larger sets of codes and for modelling many interactions between health conditions using machine learning approaches.
Selected Publications
