Dr Robert Free

I started as a lecturer at the University of Leicester in 2023. Prior to this I worked as a Research Fellow with a focus on health informatics in respiratory conditions. I also have experience of software engineering and development; and molecular biology/genetics and bioinformatics, which gives me a unique perspective. 

In addition to my lecturer role I am also the Director of Informatics for the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) through which I am driving exciting multi-disciplinary healthcare-based collaborations and projects with colleagues in the College of Life Sciences and across the BRC.

My research focuses on the use of advanced data science approaches, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to develop and translate models and technologies into data-driven tools for healthcare professionals. I am particularly interested in the use and integration of complex data from different disciplines for this purpose including molecular biology/genetics and bioinformatics; clinical data of different types (test results, coded observations, imaging) and mobile digital health data collection.

Current projects include:

• the development of AI/ML-based models to predict community acquired pneumonia outcome from complex multi-faceted hospital admission data
• generic approaches for embedding logical and AI/ML models into data-driven workflows to provide trusted/interpretable clinical decision support to healthcare workers

Lozano-Rojas, D., Free, R. C., McEwan, A. A. & Woltmann, G. A Systematic Literature Review of Machine Learning Applications for Community-Acquired Pneumonia. in Proceedings of 2021 International Conference on Medical Imaging and Computer-Aided Diagnosis (MICAD 2021) (eds. Su, R., Zhang, Y.-D. & Liu, H.) vol. 784 292–301 (Springer Singapore, 2022).

Jong, V. M. T. de, Rousset, R. Z., Antonio-Villa, N. E., Buenen, A. G., Calster, B. V., Bello-Chavolla, O. Y., Brunskill, N. J., Curcin, V., Damen, J. A. A., Fermín-Martínez, C. A., Fernández-Chirino, L., Ferrari, D., Free, R. C., Gupta, R. K., Haldar, P., Hedberg, P., Korang, S. K., Kurstjens, S., Kusters, R., Major, R. W., Maxwell, L., Nair, R., Naucler, P., Nguyen, T.-L., Noursadeghi, M., Rosa, R., Soares, F., Takada, T., Royen, F. S. van, Smeden, M. van, Wynants, L., Modrák, M., Collaboration,  the C., Asselbergs, F. W., Linschoten, M., Consortium, C.-C., Moons, K. G. M. & Debray, T. P. A. Clinical prediction models for mortality in patients with covid-19: external validation and individual participant data meta-analysis. BMJ 378, e069881 (2022).

Free, R. C., Richardson, M., Pillay, C., Hawkes, K., Skeemer, J., Broughton, R., Haldar, P. & Woltmann, G. Specialist pneumonia intervention nurse service improves pneumonia care and outcome. BMJ Open Respiratory Research 8, e000863 (2021).

Free, R. C. & Ali, A. Headfake: a Python-based tool for generating fake data. (2021) doi:10.5281/ZENODO.4890383.

Zhao, B., Bryant, L., Cordell, R., Wilde, M., Salman, D., Ruszkiewicz, D., Ibrahim, W., Singapuri, A., Coats, T., Gaillard, E., Beardsmore, C., Suzuki, T., Ng, L., Greening, N., Thomas, P., Monks, P., Brightling, C., Siddiqui, S. & Free, R. C. LabPipe: an extensible bioinformatics toolkit to manage experimental data and metadata. BMC Bioinformatics 21, (2020).

Wilde, M. J., Zhao, B., Cordell, R. L., Ibrahim, W., Singapuri, A., Greening, N. J., Brightling, C. E., Siddiqui, S., Monks, P. S. & Free, R. C. Automating and extending comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography data processing by interfacing open-source and commercial software. Analytical Chemistry 92, 13953–13960 (2020).

Free, R. C. Simpler handling of clinical concepts in R with clinconcept. arXiv:2002.11431 [cs, stat] (2020).

John, C., Reeve, N. F, Free, R. C., Williams, A. T., Ntalla, I., Farmaki, A.-E., Bethea, J., Barton, L. M., Shrine, N., Batini, C., Packer, R., Terry, S., Hargadon, B., Wang, Q., Melbourne, C. A., Adams, E. L., Bee, C. E., Harrington, K., Miola, J., Brunskill, N. J., Brightling, C. E., Barwell, J., Wallace, S. E., Hsu, R., Shepherd, D. J., Hollox, E. J., Wain, L. V., Tobin, M. D. Cohort Profile: Extended Cohort for E-Health, Environment and DNA (EXCEED). Int J Epidemiol 48, 678–679j (2019)

Beck, T., Hastings, R. K., Gollapudi, S., Free, R. C. & Brookes, A. J. GWAS Central: a comprehensive resource for the comparison and interrogation of genome-wide association studies. Eur J Hum Genet 22, 949–952 (2014).

Haldar, P., Thuraisingam, H., Patel, H., Pereira, N., Free, R. C., Entwisle, J., Wiselka, M., Hoskyns,E. W., Monk, P., Barer, M. R. & Woltmann, G. Single-step QuantiFERON screening of adult contacts: A prospective cohort study of tuberculosis risk. Thorax 68, 240–246 (2013).

Beck, T., Free, R. C., Thorisson, G. A. & Brookes, A. J. Semantically enabling a genome-wide association study database. Journal of Biomedical Semantics 3, 9 (2012).

I currently supervise a PhD student (Daniel Lozano Rojas) using machine learning and AI to predict outcome in pneumonia.

Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in PhD projects which use advanced data science (including artificial intelligence and machine learning) to develop and translate models and technologies into data-driven tools for healthcare professionals. I may have opportunities to take on projects which cross multiple aspects of health data science, including real-world data analytics; software/data engineering; and implementation.

As Director of Informatics for the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) I oversee health informatics and data science developments and build exciting multi-disciplinary healthcare-based collaborations and projects with colleagues in the College of Life Sciences and across the BRC.