Georgia C. Richards

Georgia is a joint NIHR SPCR, Naji, and Rotary Scholar studying for a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil/PhD) in Epidemiology at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and EBM DataLab. Her DPhil research analyses prescribing and sales datasets to assess the global and national use of strong pain medicines called opioids. Her PhD research is being published in various medical journals including:

1. a systematic review assessing factors associated with high-dose opioids in BMC Medicine

2. a cross-sectional study of the inclusion of opioids in 137 national Essential Medicines Lists and the relation of opioid consumption in BMJ Global Health

3. The Oxford Catalogue of Opioids in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology  

4. a cross-sectional analysis of controlled opioid consumption in 214 countries, states, and territories, as a pre-print here.  

The final chapter of her thesis on preventable opioid deaths uses web scraping, as discussed in Nature, to automatically collect coroner reports. The collection of such data led to Georgia launching a series in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine titled Coroners Concerns to Prevent Harms to disseminate key learnings to serve patient safety and educate the public, clinicians, and policy-makers about preventable deaths, and she is working on a website, the Preventable Deaths Tracker, to increase the accountability of responses to coroner reports.  

Georgia is an Associate Editor at BMJ Evidence Based Medicine, a Fellow of Reproducible Research Oxford (RROx), and a Centre for Open Science (COS) Ambassador. She is a member of OPeRA, Open Pain Research Advocacy and Appraisal, a group of early-career researchers, academics and clinicians working collaboratively to improve the transparency and openness of research. 

Georgia was the early-career representative on the EBMLive Steering Committee and co-led the 2019 Doug Altman Scholarships which funded 14 early-career researchers from across the globe to attend EBMLive in Oxford. This led to various outputs including an editorial in The BMJ, opinion pieces in BMJ EBM on challenges facing early-career researchers and building capacity in low-middle-income countries, and a review in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Georgia chaired the 2019 Steering Committee and report for the 4E's Forum to Improve the detection, analysis and reporting of harms in medicines held in Erice, Sicily. 

Georgia gained a BSc in Biomedical Science and First Class Honours in Pharmacology from the University of Queensland, Australia. In 2016, Georgia was awarded the Australian Women of the Future Award, Judges Choice Winner, for her passion and dedication to continue pain research and help others. Before starting her DPhil, Georgia worked as a medical researcher/health scientist in Australia.

Research interests:

• pharmacoepidemiology,
• drug and device safety (i.e. pharmaco-device-vigilance),
• evidence-based healthcare, 
• open science and meta-research. 

Declarations, disclosures and COIs 

I am financially supported by the NHS National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) School for Primary Care Research (SPCR), the Naji Foundation, and the Rotary Foundation to study for a Doctor of Philosophy. My travel to conferences has been funded by QANTAS & the Australian Women's Weekly (IASP 16th World Congress on Pain 2016; Australian Pain Society 36th Annual Scientific Meeting 2016), Kellogg College (Preventing Overdiagnosis 2018), the SPCR (Clinical Pharmacology Colloquium 2018; Pharmacology 2019), the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (4E's Forum 2019) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Ontario SPOR Support Unit and the St Michael's Hospital Foundation (Global Essential Medicines Meeting 2019).