Matthew Brown
Mark Elliott:
Valentina Escott-Price
Heidi Johansen-Berg
Sieun Lee
Dr Matthew Brown is a research-strategy leader working at the intersection of digital technology and global mental health. He is currently Head of Digital Technology, Mental Health & Life Sciences at Wellcome, where he leads strategic portfolios that accelerate the development, evaluation and responsible adoption of data-driven tools for mental health and the broader life sciences
Trained as a neuroscientist, Matthew holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and has conducted research across cellular, circuit and cognitive neuroscience, with previous academic posts at Imperial College London and the University of Geneva. He brings this deep scientific grounding to his current work shaping large-scale research investments and collaborative programmes.
At Wellcome, Matthew manages portfolios spanning digital mental-health technologies, foundational neuroscience infrastructure, data access, software, and skills development. His work includes co-designing new models for international neuroscientific collaboration, supporting regulatory guidance for digital mental-health tools, and establishing capacity-building initiatives such as the first African Bioinformatics Institute.
Matthew has extensive experience working across academia, philanthropy, industry and regulation, and currently serves on several advisory and steering boards, including for the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative and the MHRA. He is passionate about strengthening the neuroscience ecosystem through collaboration, open science and inclusive research cultures.
Mark Elliot has worked at the University of Manchester since 1996, mainly in the field of statistical confidentiality, founding the international renowned Confidentiality and Privacy Research Group (CAPRI) in 2002, and has managed numerous research projects within CAPRI remit.
He is one of the key international researchers in the field of Statistical Disclosure and collaborates widely with non-academic partners, particularly with national statistical agencies where he has been a key influence on disclosure control methodology used in censuses and surveys and where the SUDA software that he developed in collaboration with colleagues in Computer Science at Manchester is used.
Since 2012, he has led the UK Anonymisation Network, which has 600 members and provides advice, consultancy and training on anonymisation.
Aside from Confidentiality, Privacy and Disclosure, his research interests include Data Science Methodology and its application to social science. He is director of the University’s new interdisciplinary MSc in Data Science and the doctoral programme in Data analytics and society.
Prof. Valentina Escott-Price is a leading big-data researcher who applies advanced ML and AI to large genomic, clinical, and multimodal datasets to identify risk genes and biological pathways involved in disease. After studying mathematics at St. Petersburg University, she earned her PhD in Statistics from Cardiff University in 2001. She has worked in Cardiff’s Department of Psychological Medicine since 2002 and joined the UK Dementia Research Institute in 2017, where she leads the Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics programme. Combining strengths in mathematics, programming, biostatistics and genetics, she develops innovative computational approaches to illuminate mechanisms of complex disorders.
