Dr Georgia Richards is an Epidemiologist and the Founder and Director of the Preventable Deaths Tracker (PDT). She holds an AI+ Academic Senior Fellowship at King's College London, based in both the Dickson Poon School of Law (DPSoL) and Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine (FoLSM), and is a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford. 

Her research focuses on improving the safety of health and social care by understanding how to prevent premature and avoidable deaths using information from coroners and sheriffs, through the Preventable Deaths Tracker (PDT) for England and Wales and the equivalent for Scotland. She has a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD/DPhil) from the University of Oxford, which explored the epidemiology and safety of opioids, and a BSc in Biomedical Sciences with First Class Honours in Pharmacology from the University of Queensland, Australia. She has expertise in evidence-based healthcare, open science, drug safety, and death investigations. Despite having more than 65 academic publications and a H-index of 20, Georgia is passionate about turning academic research into public facing tools to improve their dissemination and impact, including creating the Catalogue of Opioids, the Healthy Cities Toolkit, and two Preventable Deaths Tracker’s.

Dr Richards joined King’s in June 2024 after receiving a King's Prize Fellowship and is now establishing a research group working at the interface of health, policy, law and justice to improve how we learn from death and dying. Prior to this, she was a Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Oxford where she coordinated modules in Evidence-Based Medicine and Systematic Reviews for the Oxford Medical School and MSc in Evidence-Based Healthcare. She has supervised the research of over 50 undergraduate and graduate medical students and is actively supervising two MSc and four PhD students. Georgia has also freelanced in the private sector as a Consultant Safety Epidemiologist for AstraZeneca and the World Bank and advised the Government through written and oral evidence (e.g. the follow-up Inquiry into The Coroner Service). 

Georgia welcomes PhD applicants with research proposals that focus on coronial death investigations, preventable deaths, harms, artificial intelligence or pain management. 

Research interests 

• Preventable deaths & avoidable mortality
• Opioids and pain management
• Safety epidemiology
• Patient safety
• Health justice
• Coronial law

Teaching interests 

• Death investigations: Coroners & Inquests 
• Evidence-based healthcare and systematic reviews
• Open science