Ben Goldacre

Ben Goldacre is a doctor, academic, campaigner and writer whose work focuses on uses and misuses of science and statistics by journalists, politicians, drug companies and quacks. His first book Bad Science reached #1 in the UK non-fiction charts and has sold over half a million copies worldwide. His second book Bad Pharma discusses problems in medicine, focusing on missing trials, badly designed research, and biased dissemination of evidence. His third is a collection of columns and papers. He wrote the Bad Science column for a decade in the UK Guardian newspaper, and has written for the Times, the Telegraph, the Mail, the New York Times, the BMJ, and more, alongside presenting documentaries for the BBC, and appearing regularly on radio and TV.

In policy work, he is co-author of a 2012 UK government Cabinet Office paper on getting more randomised controlled trials on policy questions; conducted an independent external review in 2012 for the Department For Education on how to improve the use of evidence in teaching; and is co-founder of AllTrials, a campaign by doctors, academics, funders, pharmacists, professional bodies, patients and the public, to prevent trial results being withheld.

Goldacre is currently a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in the Department of Primary Care in the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow in Epidemiology at LSHTM. He runs the EBMdataLab in the University of Oxford and builds interesting live data tools to improve science and healthcare, like OpenPrescribing and OpenTrials.