Hilary Shepherd

I am a PhD student visiting from Newcastle University (UK) and my PhD project focuses on dementia in people with multiple long-term conditions.

I also work for the UK government Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) within Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) as a Senior Researcher, where I am involved in conducting epidemiological studies, reviewing scientific protocols, data quality work, writing documentation, and automation and programming to directly support others to use the data for their own research.

I have experience with descriptive, Cox regression, and competing risk of death analyses in large UK primary and secondary care datasets (>1 million records) including GP, hospital, deprivation, and death data.  I am interested in healthy ageing, social determinants of health, risk factors for dementia, and how routinely collected data might be used to identify and reduce inequalities.

I was awarded a first-place presentation prize for my PhD work at both the Society for Academic Primary Care (SAPC) and North East Post-Graduate (NEPG) conferences in 2024. Prior to this I was awarded an internationally competitive scholarship to study an MSc in Dementia: Causes, Treatments and Research at University College London in 2017, and I previously worked as a Research Assistant at University College London (UCL) and directly with people with dementia and carers at the charity Alzheimer’s Society.