Professor Paul Boyle, Chief Executive, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC); Research Councils UK International Champion

Professor Boyle took up the post of ESRC Chief Executive in September 2010. Before joining the ESRC Professor Boyle was Head of the School of Geography and Geosciences at the University of St Andrews and prior to moving to St Andrews in 1999 he had been at the University of Leeds.

Professor Boyle’s research has been within population and health geography. He has had research published on migration issues, including the influence of family migration on women, on health issues, including health inequalities and the clustering of disease, and on the intersection between demographic and health issues, including the links between migration and health.

He has been the Director of the ESRC funded Longitudinal Studies Centre – Scotland. The Scottish Longitudinal Study links data from various routine administrative sources and is one of the largest studies of its type in the world.

He was also Co-Director of the ESRC funded Centre for Population Change, responsible for the co-ordination of five Scottish universities, working closely with the Scottish Government and the General Register Office for Scotland, and was Co-Investigator on the Wellcome Trust-funded Scottish Health Informatics Programme and the ESRC-funded Administrative Data Liaison Service.

Professor Boyle has been an expert advisor to the European Science Foundation committee, Foresight (Office of Science and Technology), the Ministry of Justice Data Sharing Review, Royal Statistical Society Working Party on Data Capture and Society, and a member of the International Health Data Linkage Consortium, involving directors of the major health-related record-linkage studies worldwide.

He has held Professorial fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, University of Connecticut, the University of Amsterdam and the National University of Singapore.