Why we are a City of Research

There are many benefits to being part of our City of Research community.
Your involvement will help us to:

Improve health and wellbeing for our local communities and beyond
Enhance the research opportunities and equity for our population to take part in research
Speed up our journey of discovery and innovation
Break new ground in the way we improve both physical health and mental wellbeing
Understand and tackle the causes of ill-health
Reduce health and education inequalities
Work across all communities and organisations to embed research and innovation in everything we do
Equip our decision-makers with information to shape local services – from health to education; the environment to transport.
Use our findings to promote economic development and growth
Think locally, but influence globally
Launch us an international centre of research excellence
Recruit the brightest minds to work with us on the hardest of problems
Attract investment to grow our research activity at pace and scale
Share with you first all the very latest news and findings feedback

We have a proud and long history of being at the forefront of world-class healthcare research.

This is a home-grown scientific success story, powered by people just like you … as well as your family members, your friends, your neighbours, your work colleagues, and our wider community.

It is only thanks to you that we can speed up the development of safe, new treatments, as well as deliver better outcomes for our patients.
Yet this international journey of discovery and innovation starts right here, in our very own City of Research.

We have a population of 500,000 people across our district and we believe every citizen who lives and works here should have the opportunity to contribute.

This involvement covers the whole research spectrum – from consent to linking data, to participate in clinical trials.

We hope this website will become a thriving online community, creating the world’s first People’s City of Research.

It will act as a focal point for all our different research activity, where teams can share all their latest news and give you a first-hand insight into their new projects.

It will also make it easy for you to expand our research-ready community and get involved – you can register quickly and simply here.

Interviews with some of our Health Research Experts

Professor Dinesh Saralaya

Director, National Institute for Health Research: Patient Recruitment Centre: Bradford

Dinesh talks about the huge contribution that the Bradford, Craven and Airedale district has made in the Novavax Covid-19 vaccine trial and how grateful and pleased he is that over 700 people from our community were involved.

Dr Shazza Rehman

Shazza speaks about how research is important to the development of new chemotherapy drugs and treatment regimes to treat cancers and that such research is “Not possible without you.”

Matron Jenny Syson

Jenny explains the different ways in which you can take part in research and how our dedicated research teams are passionate about ensuring our communities have the opportunity to take part in research that is relevant to them.

Dr Tamsin Gregory

Tamsin talks about the largest COVID-19 treatment trial that she was involved in and how the patients who volunteered to take part helped in identifying effective ways of treating this virus and that by volunteering have helped to improve the care of those who may be suffering from COVID-19 in the future.

Rachel Wane

Children’s Research Nurse

As the lead research nurse in Children’s research, Rachel explains how children of all ages and their families can get involved in research if they are patients but also as healthy volunteers. Studies can take place either as an in-patient, out-patient and at home and may involve one or more visits.

Professor Faruque Ghanchi

Consultant Ophthalmologist/ Head of Ophthalmology Research
Bradford Teachings Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Faruque expresses how grateful he is for all the volunteer patients who have taken part in research studies. This includes a study that helped pave the way for new treatments for macular degeneration thereby helping to reduce blindness not only in our local area but all over the world.