Georgia C. Richards

Georgia is an epidemiologist and health research scientist with expertise in evidence-based medicine, open science, drug safety and death investigations.

She has over 50 peer-reviewed publications, a H-index of 15, and over 800 citations. 

Her research focuses on improving the safety of health interventions and care by understanding how to prevent premature deaths using data from coronial inquests. Georgia's interests are in opioids and interventions used in the management of people with chronic pain. She founded and leads the Preventable Deaths Tracker and the Catalogue of Opioids. 

Georgia has a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil/PhD) from the University of Oxford (2021) and a Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours in Pharmacology from the University of Queensland, Australia (2015).

She coordinated and taught Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) and systematic review modules for the undergraduate Medical School and MSc in EBHC Knowledge Into Action.

Georgia is a Founding Fellow of the Pandemic EVIDENCE Collaboration, a member of the Transparent & Open Research Collaboration in Health (TORCH), a Fellow of Reproducible Research Oxford (RROx), a Centre for Open Science (COS) Ambassador, and a member of the Catalogue of Bias Collaboration.

Georgia has supervised the research of over 40 undergraduate and graduate medical students and is actively supervising two MSc and two DPhil/PhD students.

She welcomes supervision queries from all students interested in: 

• patient safety, preventable deaths, and harms in healthcare,
• pharmaco-epidemiology and pharmaco-device-vigilance (i.e. medicine use and drug safety),
• open science, open data, and meta-research.

Georgia has supervised students for medical electives, internships, Special Study Modules (SSM), Academic Special Interest Projects (ASIP), Special Study Themes (SST), and Final Honours Scheme (FHS) essays and research projects, which have all led to significant publications, including in the British Journal of General Practice, Drug Safety, Journal of Public Health, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) Open, among others. 

Georgia's PhD research assessed the use and harms of strong pain medicines called opioids, which is summarised here and openly available for download here. She was based in the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and worked with members from the Bennett Institute of Applied Data Science. 

During her DPhil, Georgia was the early-career representative on the EBMLive Steering Committee and co-led the 2019 Doug Altman Scholarships and the 2022 David Sackett Fellowships, which funded 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. 

Before moving to the UK, Georgia worked as a medical researcher and health scientist in 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. 

I have a fixed-term part-time contract to teach and supervise research at the University of Oxford. I have had travel expenses reimbursed to attend and present at conferences and received fees for speaking at events, training coroners, and teaching.

I am the Director of a limited company that is independently contracted to conduct research and consultancy and receives fees from subscriptions to a personal Substack publication.

Between September 2017 and March 2021, I was 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 (DPhil) at the University of Oxford.