Rory Collins studied Medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, London, and Statistics at George Washington University and Oxford University.

He came to Oxford in 1981 to run the ISIS “mega-trials” which showed that emergency treatment of heart attacks with streptokinase and aspirin halves mortality. Subsequently, his focus has involved showing that lowering LDL-cholesterol safely reduces the risk of having heart attacks and strokes.

In 1985, he became co-director (with Richard Peto) of the University of Oxford’s Clinical Trial Service Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU). He was appointed BHF Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology in 1996, and Head of the Nuffield Department of Population Health in 2013.

Rory became Principal Investigator of the UK Biobank prospective study of 500,000 people in 2005. He was elected to the Fellowship of the UK Academy of Medical Science in 2004 and the Royal Society in 2015, and knighted by the Queen for services to Science in 2011.