Our Future Health Chief Medical Officer awarded OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours
The award
An OBE is a prestigious award meaning ‘Officer of the Order of the British Empire’. It is awarded to people who have made a major contribution in their field of work, with their work gaining national prominence.
Raghib’s journey
As well as being Our Future Health’s Chief Medical Officer, Raghib is an Honorary Consultant in Acute Medicine at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, Senior Clinical Research Associate at the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Public Health Research Center and Associate Professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. In March 2020, he took leave from his university work and volunteered to return, unpaid, to frontline NHS duties and worked on the frontline in all four waves of COVID-19. In October 2020 he was appointed as an unpaid independent expert adviser on COVID-19 and ethnicity to the UK Government’s Race Disparity Unit and subsequently worked closely with Equalities Office, the NHS, the media and community organisations to improve vaccine confidence and uptake.
Raghib graduated from Cambridge University in 2000 and has been awarded postgraduate degrees in Epidemiology and Public Health from the Universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford and was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 2013.
He has been involved in health inequalities research since 2004 – as secretary of the UK Biobank ethnicity subgroup, Director of the INDOX Cancer Research Network and as Principal Investigator for the first study of cancer incidence by individual ethnic group in England.
He is also the Principal Investigator for the UAE Healthy Future Study investigating risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Chief Medical Officer responsibilities
As Chief Medical Officer, Raghib has overall responsibility for ensuring that Our Future Health recruits a diverse population that is truly reflective of the UK and he will be working with the NHS, medical charities, national and local government and industry partners to make sure the programme achieves its main aim to detect and prevent diseases earlier, enabling people to live longer, healthier lives.
Celebrating our Chief Medical Officer’s achievement
Professor Sir John Bell, Chair of Our Future Health, commented:
“On behalf of everyone at Our Future Health, I want to extend our congratulations to Raghib on his OBE. I am delighted that Raghib’s commitment to help others and improve the health of the nation has been recognised at the highest level.”
Reflecting on his achievement, Raghib Ali, Chief Medical Officer at Our Future Health commented:
“I am very happy to receive this prestigious award and to have had the opportunity to help save many lives over the course of the pandemic – both as a frontline doctor and through the vaccine programme. It has very much been a team effort and there are many unsung heroes I’ve worked with who don’t always get the recognition they deserve. I’m very pleased to have joined Our Future Health as Chief Medical Officer and look forward to working with whole team to continue helping people live healthier lives for longer.”
Learn more about the Our Future Health team.