WEBINAR SERIES ON RWE 2026-2027
Dr Nawab Qizilbash, MD MSc DPhil
Chief Medical Officer and CEO of OXON Epidemiology
Dr Nawab Qizilbash provides senior medical and epidemiological leadership across the design, conduct and interpretation of real-world evidence studies. As a Senior Clinical Epidemiologist, he brings together extensive expertise in clinical medicine, epidemiology, meta-analysis and evidence-based medicine, offering clients a distinctive combination of scientific rigor, strategic insight and practical clinical perspective.
He is also Honorary Associate Professor at the LSHTM, Honorary Consultant Geriatrician in Madrid, and a member of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. These roles reflect the strong academic and clinical foundations that continue to inform his work at OXON.
His previous background spans senior leadership roles in epidemiology within the pharmaceutical industry, together with extensive academic and clinical experience in internal medicine and geriatrics. He trained and worked at internationally recognized institutions including the University of Oxford and the LSHTM and collaborated with leading figures such as Professor Sir Richard Peto and Professor Sir John Grimley Evans. This combination of industry, academic and clinical experience enables him to bring both methodological depth and applied judgement to OXON’s projects.
Dr Qizilbash has co-authored multiple high-impact publications, including 8 in The Lancet, 1 in JAMA and 3 in BMJ, covering topics such as epidemiology, pragmatic trials and meta-analysis. He was also the founding editor of the Cochrane Dementia Group and chief editor of the textbook Evidence-Based Dementia Practice, further reflecting his longstanding contribution to the development of evidence-based research and clinical thinking.
Among CROs in Europe, Dr Qizilbash offers clients a rare combination of high-level epidemiological and clinical expertise across a wide range of therapeutic areas.
Designing & Delivering Successful RWE Across France
Dr Patrick Blin
Pharmaco-Epi Senior Consultant, SNDS expert and Vice-president of the Ethics and Scientific Committee for Health Research, Studies and Evaluations (CESREES)
Dr Patrick Blin (MD, MSc) is a public health physician and a biostatistician with 40 years of leadership in epidemiology and pharmaco-epidemiology. His main area of interest is the evaluation of the performance of drugs and devices in real world setting (Real World Evidence or RWE), especially using the SNDS French nationwide claims database, and link between clinical data and the SNDS, with a large experience in the application of high-dimensional propensity scores for comparative effectiveness and risk comparison studies.
He was born in Paris (France) and studied at the Bicêtre Faculty of Medicine of Paris Saclay University, followed by a Master of Biomathematics (Sorbonne university) with Professor Alain-Jacques Valleron, member of the French Academy of Sciences. After a year in an inter-African public health organization, he participated for 3 years in the establishment of a biostatistics department at the St Louis Paris University Hospital, before heading departments of biostatistics in the pharmaceutical industry for 3 years. He was then the scientific director of CRO specialized in epidemiology and pharmaco-epidemiology for about twenty years. During this period, he collaborated many times with the Bordeaux PharmacoEpi platform of the Bordeaux University in the early 1990s, and became its Scientific and Medical Director between 2012 and 2022. He is now an independent consultant in pharmacoepidemiology.
He has been appointed by decree, member of the Expert Committee for Health Research, Studies and Evaluations (CEREES), then to the Ethics and Scientific Committee for Health Research, Studies and Evaluations (CESREES), of which he is Vice-President since the beginning; Both committees reviewing scientific and public interest of studies using secondary data before CNIL French Data Protection Agency authorization. He is also a member of the National Commission for Research Involving Humans (CNRIPH). He has co-authored over 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals with more than 4,000 citations, and has been a member of the scientific committee for numerous epidemiology and pharmaco-epidemiology conferences.
Designing & Delivering Successful RWE Across Japan
Prof. Masao Iwagami
Clinical Epidemiologist, Professor in the Institute of Medicine, University of Tsukuba, Japan and Honorary Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), UK.
Dr Masao Iwagami graduated from the University of Tokyo in 2008, completed his internship and nephrology residency in Japanese hospitals, received the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates certificate in the USA in 2010, and worked as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Haemodialysis and Apheresis, the University of Tokyo Hospital in 2013.
He studied clinical epidemiology at the School of Public Health, the University of Tokyo in 2012, at MSc Epidemiology in 2013/2014 and PhD Epidemiology and Population Health in 2014-2018 at LSHTM.
He has received several awards (such as the Kidney International Reviewer-of-the-Year Award in 2021 and 2024) and published over 200 original articles in major journals (such as Lancet Healthy Longevity using the UK CPRD, Lancet Regional Health Western Pacific using the Medical Data Vision database in Japan, and Drug Safety using the JMDC database in Japan).
He is the editorial board member of Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, Drug Safety, Kidney International, Journal of Epidemiology, and Annals of Clinical Epidemiology.