Welcoming our new Bennett Institute team member, Darren Smyth: a lawyer!

Here at the Bennett Institute we are a truly multidisciplinary team: clinicians, academics and software engineers, working together to produce tools, as well as papers.

This is glorious fun, and productive. From our time working together as a team we now have software engineers who know about clinical trials, prescribing data, and more; and we have researchers and clinicians who know a bit about building websites.

This may or may not thrill you, but I will share it: our academics write code that runs live on our websites! In addition, our team can be creative, because we all know a little about each others’ work: about what is possible with software and data, and what kinds of problem need solving in medicine.

So I’m delighted to welcome a new member to our posse. Darren Smyth is a UK and European Patent Attorney, and partner in the intellectual property law firm EIP, with a DPhil in synthetic organic chemistry from Oxford. You can read his Bennett Institute bio here, and his EIP bio here.

We first worked with Darren for our pregabalin papers (a small part of this work is previewed in our preprint here, with much more to come soon). We are now collaborating on an exciting new project involving clinical trials transparency in the UK and EU.

But this collaboration has awakened a hunger in us: we would love to have a US lawyer join our team, with experience or knowledge around trials regulation, or similar. If you’re interested, or know anyone who might be, please do get in touch.