The Transform MS Team
Transform MS CIC is driven by individuals passionate about improving measurement science and the outcomes for people living with MS. Below you can find out a bit more about our team.
Professor Jeremy Hobart; Director & Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Jeremy Hobart is a Consultant Neurologist at Derriford Hospital, and Professor at the Plymouth University Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. His clinical sub-specialist interest is the diagnosis and management of people with multiple sclerosis. His medical training was at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London, and neurology training was undertaken predominantly at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square. He is also President of the South Devon branch of the MS Society.
Jeremy Hobart’s research interest is rating scales for measuring health outcomes. His training in health measurement and rating scale science has included a PhD in Psychometrics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Prof Donna Lamping), and post doctoral attachments to the University of Chicago (Prof Ben Wright) and, more recently, a secondment to Murdoch University Perth, Western Australia (Prof David Andrich) sponsored by a Royal Society of Medicine Ellison-Cliffe Travelling Fellowship. By a combination of chance and design, this training means that Jeremy is one of only a handful of clinicians formally trained in rating scale science. He has led the development of a number of rating scales, has published widely in this area, and holds over £7 million in research grants.
Jerry Clough; Chair
Jerry is Vice President, Population Health Management for Optum Health Solutions UK. He has a long and successful career in the NHS where he worked for nearly 20 years as a Finance Director and Chief Executive. In addition he ran his own business for a decade with a focus on executive and team development, coaching and facilitation to help individuals and deliver programmes of change in health and care. It is within the coaching context, following a chance meeting on a cricket field, that Jerry started to work with Professor Hobart.
Jerry is passionate about integration – bringing together services for individuals and communities and cites his work leading the NHS in the creation of the integration and pooled services and budget with the local authority in Plymouth as a career highlight that continues to deliver benefits for the long term. This expertise and drive to create benefits for community helps drive the CIC, but also provides expertise to some key projects that Transform MS is developing.
Tracey Cottam; Non-Executive Director
Tracey is an experienced leader, with c.35 years experience, across the range of Board/Executive, senior Leadership, Consultant and Commercial roles within organisations across multiple sectors. Her experience spans strategic transformation across whole organisations to tactical/operational management. She has capability and practical experience of strategy development, large scale transformation, organisation design/development, cultural change, individual and team development, quality improvement, stakeholder engagement and management and policy development.
Tracey is passionate about the power of teams. Her early career spent in industry learning to apply lean principles and techniques demonstrated to her the important role all leaders play in enabling their team to be successful. By partnering with other leaders, Tracey believes that, if you create the right environment and conditions, with the right support and encouragement individuals and teams are capable of continuously improving how they deliver value, and become eager to strive for the “art of the possible”.
Dr Andrew Blight; Director
After completing a PhD in Zoology at the University of Bristol, Andrew moved to the United States and began an academic career in neuroscience, focussing on spinal cord physiology and its reaction to injury. He held successive positions at New York University Medical Center, Purdue University, and the University of North Carolina, where he was Professor and Director of the Neurosurgery Research Laboratory. From there he moved into industry and became Chief Scientific Officer of Acorda Therapeutics, a small start-up company in New York, in order to pursue clinical trials of the drug 4-aminopyridine, or fampridine, first in spinal cord injury and then in multiple sclerosis.
Andrew met Professor Hobart during the large-scale clinical studies in MS, when the need arose to accurately quantify the effects of the drug on walking ability. Professor Hobart acted as an expert consultant on outcome measures for the US development program and provided invaluable support in going through the regulatory approval process. After the approval was obtained in the US, Andrew and Professor Hobart worked together to further analyse and facilitate the presentation of the clinical data to the European Medicines Agency, helping to gain the second approval. Andrew’s career has taken him from the cellular level of individual laboratory research, through the issues of clinical translation, management and design of large clinical trials, drug regulatory affairs, and some of the socioeconomic intricacies of moving from approval to availability. He is now retired from Acorda as an independent consultant, living back in the West of England, and happy to be engaged with the Transform MS team and support its goals as a Director.
Michael Paisey; Group Project Lead
Michael held the role of Multiple Sclerosis and Health Measurement Group Manager since November 2018. This role based within University of Plymouth Enterprise Limited saw Michael supporting Professor Hobart and his team in delivering clinical services to over 1500 Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients, commercial clinical trials in MS, academic research, managing unique historical MS Datasets and developing and licensing health measurement instruments that have supported FDA approval of medicines.
Michael’s previous expertise and experience is in working closely with academic teams and their partners to maximise research and innovation income and wider outputs. Within these roles he has been Project Manager of a £3.4M Digital Health project, supported numerous Multi-£million grant awards from RC-UK, EU, Charity and Industry partners. Instigated and managed numerous HE-Private Sector Partnerships. Previously he has worked as Head of Marketing and Admissions and managed the Academisation of a Local Primary School sponsored by the University of Plymouth