It is with great pleasure that I introduce to you John Wright, an outstanding caring and collaborative health researcher. John grew up in Romford, East London, the 4^th of  five children, with a younger brother and three older sisters, from whom he got hand-me-down clothes, including blouses, which possibly explains his subsequent liking of the New Romantics. At school he loved science and when it came to university Medicine just won out over engineering. He chose Leeds University because of the alternative music scene and fell in love with Yorkshire. As a Yorkshire lass, that doesn’t surprise me!

After graduating from medical school in 1987 John trained as a respiratory physician, becoming a Member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1990. For most of his adult life he has worked as a clinician and academic in Bradford, establishing the Bradford Institute for Health Research, in the grounds of the Bradford Royal infirmary in 2007 and the Born in Bradford Birth cohort around the same time, with those endeavours resulting in Bradford becoming the first City of research in the UK.

Above all things he cares about the gap in life and health chances between those who have and those who do not, and he focuses his energy and abilities on reducing those inequalities. Early in his career in 1990-1993, he and Helen, his partner worked as medical officers in Swaziland. Together with one other doctor they provided the health care for a population of 250k local residents and an additional 100k Mozambican refugees. Catherine, their first daughter, was born in Swaziland, and Helen and John continue to support the people there through an international health partnership that John established. In 2015 John was in one of the first groups of UK NHS staff to volunteer to help control the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. They were there to establish a treatment centre, and in one of his video diary entries he describes the desperate situation of the holding facilities and his raw feelings about the disparity between facilities for local staff and those of the group of which he was part. “For five months this decrepit, DIY isolation centre has been on the deadly front line of the battle against Ebola….Everyday staff have risked their lives… Then we arrive with great fanfare, six months too late, in our fleet of shiny new 4x4s …… prevaricating about the wrong sort of biohazard suits. Meanwhile, an 11th doctor has died from Ebola in Sierra Leone. He was clear about the need for international volunteers but recognised how slow to respond we often are when such disasters are happening elsewhere.

Establishing the Born in Bradford cohort and the extension of that into the Bradford City of Research and ActEarly programme amongst other activities was also motivated by his desire to reduce inequalities. He could see that populations like Bradford, and I speak as someone born and brought up there, are often seen as troubled hot-spots of deprivation, racial tension and desperation, where community research was most needed but was least likely to happen - an idea subsequently adopted by Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer of England. Unlike many such research programmes, John ensured that these research activities were fully embedded within the community, giving its people a voice and ensuring action by bringing together the local council, teachers, health care providers and other stake-holders. This meant that when the COVID pandemic occurred, research findings emerged in real time and influenced the Bradford response by feeding in to the council led gold command.

John has always used blogs and video diaries to try to bring groups together through showing the humans behind difficult, often desperate situations. At a time when global and national inequalities are increasing, and it seems like prejudice is increasing, these recordings are a reminder that humans have more in common than we do things that divide us, all that we all want for ourselves and our loved ones a healthy and happy life. It is surely better that we find ways to share limited resources and support each other through current and future crises. John and his work exemplify this caring and inclusive approach to research and to life.

Pro Vice-Chancellor, I present to you John Wright as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Science.