Russell Viner

Russell Mardon Viner, CBE FMedSci (born 1963) is an Australian-British paediatrician and policy researcher who is Chief Scientific Advisor at the Department for Education and Professor of Adolescent Health at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. He is an expert on child and adolescent health in the UK and internationally. He was a member of the UK Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) during the COVID-19 pandemic (advising on children, young people and schools) and was President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health from 2018 to 2021. He remains clinically active, seeing young people with diabetes each week at UCL Hospitals. Viner is vice-chair of the NHS England Transformation Board for Children and Young People and Chair of the Stakeholder Council for the Board. He is a non-executive director (NED) at Great Ormond St. Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust, also sitting on the Trust's Finance & Investment and the Quality and Safety sub-committees.

His research focuses on the health of children and young people, from global analyses of social determinants of health and global burden of disease (GBD), through use of ‘big’ routine data in children and young people's healthcare, to conducting intervention studies both at the school level and clinical interventions in obesity and diabetes.

Education and professional life

Viner studied medicine at the University of Queensland and then undertook professional training in paediatrics and paediatric endocrinology and diabetes in Brisbane, Australia and in the UK. He undertook a PhD the University of Cambridge in History and Philosophy of Science (1992–96), before moving to London in 1997 to set up the first Adolescent Medicine unit in the UK jointly between Great Ormond St. Hospital and UCL Hospitals.

He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) and a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP, 1995), of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (FRCPCH, 1998) and was awarded a fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians (London) in 2000.

He us currently named on over £17 million in current research grants, being Chief/Principal Investigator on approximately £8 million, with funding obtained from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), the Medical Research Council (MRC), and various charities. He was appointed as an NIHR Senior Investigator in 2015.

Viner was appointed as Chief Scientific Advisor (CSA) to the Department for Education in January 2023, with responsibility for science and evidence use within the department and science advice to Ministers. He is a part of the UK Government's CSA Network under the Government Chief Scientific Advisor, Dame Angela Maclean.

Viner has published over 450 publications ( more than 200 as original research publications and a further 150 other peer-reviewed publications) in international journals. His H-index is 96.

Personal life

Viner is married to Dasha Nicholls, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Imperial College. They have one son.

Honours and awards

• Cambridge Commonwealth Trust PhD Studentship 1993–96.
• Mid Career Fellowship, Health Foundation UK, 2002–04
• HEFCE Clinical Senior Lecturership Award, 2007–12
• Milroy Lecturer, Royal College of Physicians of London, 2014.
• Dame Elizabeth Murdoch Fellowship 2016, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Royal Children's Hospital & University of Melbourne, Australia.
• Senior Investigator, National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), 2016-current
• Founder's Award, International Association of Adolescent Health, 2017
• Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE), awarded in the 2022 New Year's Honours List.