Christina Pagel

Christina Pagel (/ˈpɑːɡəl/ PAR-gull) is a British–German mathematician and professor of operational research at University College London (UCL). She is the first female director of the Clinical Operational Research Unit (CORU)[1] at UCL, which applies operational research, data analysis and mathematical modelling to problems in health care. Pagel also holds an honorary researcher position within Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Christina Pagel
Pagel in 2016
Born
London, England
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom, Germany
Alma materUniversity of Oxford

King's College London Imperial College London

Birkbeck College, University of London
OccupationProfessor of operational research
EmployerUniversity College London

Early life and education

Pagel was born in London to German parents in 1975. Her father, Manfred Pagel, was a journalist, later senior manager, at Reuters and her mother, Barbara Pagel, was a teacher. She attended St Paul's Girls School in London.

Pagel graduated with a BA in Mathematics from Queen's College, University of Oxford in 1996. She also holds an MSc in Mathematical Physics from King's College London, and MAs in Classical Civilisation, Medieval History and an MSc in Applied Statistics with Medical Applications from Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2002 Pagel was awarded a PhD in Space Physics on Turbulence in the interplanetary magnetic field from Imperial College London.

Research

Pagel's early career was spent in Boston, Massachusetts, studying the scattering of electrons in interplanetary space using data from the ACE spacecraft at Boston University with Professor Nancy Crooker.[2] In 2005 she left physics, returning to London to take up a position with the UCL Clinical Operational Research Unit applying mathematics to problems in health care.

In 2016, Pagel was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy and Practice by the Commonwealth Fund,[3] through which Pagel spent 2016–2017 in the USA researching (a) the priorities of Republican and Democrat politicians for the goals of national health policy working with the Milbank Memorial Fund and (b) how clinical decision support systems can be better implemented within intensive care settings.[4] During that year, she also completed a fellowship at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.[5][6]

Pagel's current research uses approaches from mathematical modelling, operational research and data sciences to help people within the health service make better decisions.[7] She focuses on mortality and morbidity outcomes following cardiac surgery in children and adults in the UK, leading and contributing to several large national projects;[8][9][10][11] understanding the course of a child's stay in paediatric intensive care;[12] mathematical methods to support service delivery within hospitals.[13]

Pagel was instrumental in developing a statistical model to take into account the complexity of individual children with congenital heart disease, when considering a hospital's survival rate. This led to the Partial Risk Adjustment in Surgery (PRAiS) model, which has been used by the National Congenital Heart Disease Audit since 2013 to publish hospital survival rates,[14] and the associated software, developed by Pagel, has been purchased by all UK hospitals performing children's heart surgery.[15] She then led a multidisciplinary project[10] working with the Children's Heart Federation, Sense about Science and Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter to build a website on survival after children's heart surgery, launched in 2016.[16][17][18][19]

In 2019 Pagel was awarded the Lyn Thomas Impact Medal from the Operational Research Society, along with her colleagues Dr Sonya Crowe and Prof Martin Utley. The award was made for their work related to congenital heart disease and recognised the "significant impact on the lives of children with congenital heart disease, as well on their families and the growing population of adults with the condition."[20]

Outreach and public engagement

Pagel is active in school and university outreach, encouraging participation in mathematics and science subjects.[21][22][23][24]

Her work in developing the children's heart surgery website formed the basis of a national guide for researchers in how to involve the public[25] and was separately featured in a Health Foundation guide on engagement.[26]

She also contributed to the Sense about Science guide "Making Sense of Statistics".[27]

Politics and policy

Pagel uses tools from her research to design and analyse political data from public polls, particularly in the context of Brexit[28][29][30][31] and health policy,[32][33] and she is known as a regular podcast contributor on both themes.[34][35][36]

In May 2020, Pagel joined the Independent SAGE committee, whose aim is to offer independent advice to the UK Government during the COVID-19 pandemic.[37][38][39] As part of her work for Independent SAGE, she has been quoted in several newspapers[39][40][41] and appeared on ITV News,[42] Sky News,[43] Channel 4 News,[44][45] and BBC Newsnight[46][47] and various podcasts[48][49] discussing the UK's response to the pandemic.

References

  1. UCL. "UCL – London's Global University". Clinical Operational Research Unit. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  2. Pagel, C.; Crooker, N. U.; Larson, D. E.; Kahler, S. W.; Owens, M. J. (2005). "Understanding electron heat flux signatures in the solar wind" (PDF). Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics. 110 (A1). doi:10.1029/2004JA010767. ISSN 2156-2202.
  3. UCL (1 February 2016). "Christina Pagel wins prestigious Harkness Fellowship". UCL Mathematical & Physical Sciences. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  4. "Christina Pagel | Commonwealth Fund". www.commonwealthfund.org. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  5. "Fellowship Alumni". ihi.org. Retrieved 9 October 2019.
  6. Pagel, Christina; Ramnarayan, Padmanabhan; Ray, Samiran; Peters, Mark J. (1 February 2018). "Development and implementation of a real time statistical control method to identify the start and end of the winter surge in demand for paediatric intensive care". European Journal of Operational Research. 264 (3): 847–858. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2016.08.023. ISSN 0377-2217.
  7. "Prof Christina Pagel – profile". 16 October 2019.
  8. "LAUNCHES QI: Linking AUdit and National datasets in Congenital HEart Services for Quality Improvement". The Health Foundation. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
  9. "NIHR Funding and Awards: CHAMPION". fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
  10. "NIHR Funding and Awards: PRAiS 2". fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
  11. "NIHR Funding and Awards: Morbidity after heart surgery". fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
  12. "NIHR Funding and Awards: DEPICT". fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
  13. Pagel, Christina; Banks, Victoria; Pope, Catherine; Whitmore, Pauline; Brown, Katherine; Goldman, Allan; Utley, Martin (December 2017). "Development, implementation and evaluation of a tool for forecasting short term demand for beds in an intensive care unit" (PDF). Operations Research for Health Care. 15: 19–31. doi:10.1016/j.orhc.2017.08.003.
  14. "National Congenital Heart Disease Audit 2013 – 2016". HQIP. 8 March 2018. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
  15. "XIP: PRAiS v3". XIP, online licensing portal. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  16. Pagel, Christina; Spiegelhalter, David (21 June 2016). "Making NHS data public is not the same as making it accessible – we can and should do better". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  17. "New online tool makes heart surgery data more accessible | StatsLife". www.statslife.org.uk. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  18. "Doctor's Diary: There's another side to the closure of children's heart surgery wards". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  19. The Lancet (June 2016). "Communicating risk about children's heart surgery well". The Lancet. 387 (10038): 2576. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(16)30888-1. ISSN 0140-6736. PMID 27353805.
  20. "Lyn Thomas Medal Winners – The OR Society". theorsociety.com. Retrieved 22 December 2019.
  21. "IMA Early Career Mathematicians' Autumn Conference 2018". IMA. 18 September 2018. Retrieved 9 October 2019.
  22. "Mathematical Sciences Seminar – Birkbeck, University of London". bbk.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 October 2019.
  23. "We're Stuck! | China Plate Theatre". www.chinaplatetheatre.com. Retrieved 9 October 2019.
  24. "I'm a Scientist, Get me out of here! 2013 participants". 9 October 2019.
  25. "Public engagement: a practical guide – Sense about Science". senseaboutscience.org. Retrieved 9 October 2019.
  26. "Section 3: Extending influence and widening impact". The Health Foundation. Retrieved 9 October 2019.
  27. "Making Sense of Statistics – Sense about Science". senseaboutscience.org. Retrieved 9 October 2019.
  28. "Polling 'People vs Parliament': What a new survey says about our constitutional mess". politics.co.uk. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  29. "With No-Deal Now Leavers' Preferred Brexit Outcome, Ruling It Out Could Create Problems for the Tories". HuffPost. 8 April 2019. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  30. Editor, Oliver Wright, Policy (27 April 2019). "It's not only MPs split on best Brexit". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 6 October 2019.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  31. Pagel, Christina. "Why an election is the best bet to stop Brexit". The New European. Retrieved 1 November 2019.
  32. "Christina Pagel: Doctors and nurses can have an influence on Brexit to help protect the NHS". The BMJ. 14 November 2018. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  33. Jones, David K.; Pagel, Christina; Koller, Christopher F. (5 December 2018). "The Future of Health Care Reform – A View from the States on Where We Go from Here". New England Journal of Medicine. 379 (23): 2189–2191. doi:10.1056/NEJMp1809153. PMID 30575461.
  34. "Sovereignty Matters and Matters of Sovereignty". Audioboom. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  35. "Voices from Grand Challenges – Brexit Survey with Prof Christina Pagel and Christabel Cooper". Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  36. "WIHI: How to Beat the Boring Aspects of QI". ihi.org. Retrieved 9 October 2019.
  37. Davis, Nicola (4 May 2020). "Rival Sage group says Covid-19 policy must be clarified". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 5 May 2020.
  38. Mahase, Elisabeth (5 May 2020). "Covid-19: UK advisory panel members are revealed after experts set up new group". BMJ. 369: m1831. doi:10.1136/bmj.m1831. ISSN 1756-1833. PMID 32371467.
  39. Sample, Ian (22 May 2020). "Scientists warn 1 June is too early for schools to reopen in England". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 22 May 2020.
  40. "UK on course for 30,000 more coronavirus deaths unless Johnson changes approach, experts warn". The Independent. 26 June 2020. Retrieved 29 June 2020.
  41. Devlin, Hannah; Siddique, Haroon (26 June 2020). "Improve test and trace before schools reopen, Sage report says". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 29 June 2020.
  42. @chrischirp (23 June 2020). "ITV London News" (Tweet) via Twitter.
  43. @chrischirp (10 June 2020). "Was very briefly on Sky News tonight..." (Tweet) via Twitter.
  44. "Tory MP says PM needs to 'rethink' Covid restrictions and 'get Britain working again'". Channel 4 News. 27 November 2020. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
  45. "'If you alienate public, you blame them, you point fingers at them, things fall apart' – behavioural scientist Prof Steve Reicher". Channel 4 News. 19 October 2020. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
  46. @BBCNewsnight (23 June 2020). ""I think we are moving too fast. One thing we know we need is a test, trace and isolate system. Every country that is opening up successfully has one in place." says Christina Pagel, UCL Clinical Research Director" (Tweet) via Twitter.
  47. @BBCNewsnight (26 October 2020). ""Covid is moving faster than political decision making."" (Tweet) via Twitter.
  48. @bunker_pod (10 December 2020). "Ian Dunt talks to @chrischirp of @IndependentSage about the risks from the Christmas Window, and how to stay [free] from COVID over the festive period" (Tweet) via Twitter.
  49. "More or Less - Spreadsheet snafu, 'Long Covid' quantified, and the birth of probability". BBC Sounds. 7 October 2020. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
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