The HIEC NE Team

Director – Dr Philip Nichols

Dr Philip Nichols, Consultant Neurologist at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, took up his position as Director of the Health Innovation and Education Cluster for the North East on 1st June 2010 and is tasked with helping accelerate progress in innovation and education within the NHS in order to drive up the quality of health care for the benefit of patients in the region.

Dr Nichols is a graduate of Newcastle University Medical School (BMedSci, MBBS Newcastle 1991) and holds a postgraduate qualification in Medicine from Oxford (MRC Clinical Research Fellow, DPhil, St. John’s College). In 2002, he won a Department of Health Clinician Scientist Award which funded his Multiple Sclerosis Research Group at Newcastle University and he is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a member of the Association of British Neurologists.

From 2005 to 2009, Dr Nichols held the position of Chief Medical Officer and Head of Clinical Development at Cambridge Laboratories (Ireland) Ltd, a UK & Ireland based entrepreneurial pharmaceutical company. He had overall responsibility for pre-clinical and clinical phases of drug development and was a member of the value realisation team negotiating the recent sale of a major pharmaceutical asset (Xenazine Nitoman), to BIOVAIL Corporation, Canada’s largest publically traded pharmaceutical company.

Dr Nichols is also the founder of NB Medical Education, the largest, specialist independent medical education company in the UK & Ireland delivering CPD update courses to over 5000 GPs per year.

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