James Thomas PhD Professor of Social Research and Policy Assistant Director SSRU Associate Director EPPI-Centre Assistant Director for Health and Wellbeing, Institute of Education

I am Director of the EPPI-Centre's Reviews Facility to support policy development and implementation for the Department of Health, England, which undertakes systematic reviews across a range of policy areas to support the department. I specialise in developing methods for research synthesis, in particular for qualitative and mixed methods reviews and in using emerging information technologies such as text mining in research. I lead a module on synthesis and critical appraisal on the EPPI-Centre'sMSc in Research for Public Policy and Practice and development on the Centre's in-house reviewing software, EPPI-Reviewer.

I am also Assistant Director for Health & Wellbeing at the Institute of Education, a job I share with Mark Newman. In this role, we aim to support the Institute's activities relating to health and wellbeing, linking us at an institutional level with other HEI and 3rd sector organisations, and making relevant 'links' between different sections of the Institute.

Web page: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/research/SSRU_52.html

Google Scholar page: http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=dhTcJgkAAAAJ&hl