Professor Chris Fox is co-medical director of NIHR HealthTech Research Centre for Sustainable Innovation and national industry engagement lead for the NIHR Health Technology Coordinating Centre. Chris is an expert in mental health and dementia research, with a focus on clinical trials and applied research. He began his career training in psychiatry, spending six years working on trauma, personality assessments, and psychometric assessments with the Ministry of Defence. He later went into the NHS and trained at Oxford, completing an MD on anger characterisation in elderly mentally ill patients at UCL.
Chris has worked across the UK in both clinical and academic roles, including running a memory service in Kent and serving as the first Clinical Director at the Kent and Medway NIHR Comprehensive Research Network. In 2010, he became the first Clinical Academic Psychiatrist at Norwich Medical School and Eastern region dementia DeNDRoN lead and later led the Department of Clinical Academic Medicine until 2021.
Chris has a long- term collaboration with Indiana Medical School. He jointly co-developed work on the harms of screening, medication trials in dementia, collaborative care in dementia and the most highly-cited anticholinergic burden scale. He worked as an NHS consultant for 9 years and developed an applied research strategy.
An accomplished researcher, Chris has led multiple national research programmes in dementia, sleep, and multi-morbidity, including NIHR TIMES, CARECOACH, DISCOVERY, SPLENDID, and INFLAIM. He has developed widely cited clinical trials, including work on dementia screening, medication trials, and collaborative care. He also collaborates internationally with Indiana Medical School. Chris is currently leading with 4 health care technology companies on multi-million pound research programmes in software/AI/ technical devices to improve delivery and assessment of health care.
Key research themes are:
- Data and multi-morbidity including applied artificial intelligence
- Technology and healthcare
- Novel medication CTIMPS relevant to dementia
- Brain health – multi-morbidity
