Richard Dodds

Richard completed his undergraduate medical training at St. George’s, University of London in 2005 including a BSc in Human Genetics. After four years of foundation and core medical training in south-west Thames, he moved to the Wessex Deanery to start an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship in Geriatric Medicine in 2009, based at the Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit and under the supervision of Professor Avan Aihie Sayer. This enabled him to gain experience of observational epidemiology alongside full-time clinical work. He worked on two projects exploring associations between birth weight and muscle strength, including a systematic review which forms one output of the HALCyon (Healthy Ageing across the Life Course) programme. He then used his Academic Clinical Fellowship research time to study the MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2011.

Richard was awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellowship in 2012, allowing him undertake a three year period of research leading to a PhD. He will be exploring the life course trajectory of muscle strength and the relationship with physical activity.