Dr Matthew O’Connell is Senior Lecturer in Health Services Research and Population Health Sciences. Prior to joining King’s in 2019, he was postdoctoral researcher, then Beeson-CARDI Leadership Fellow in Ageing Research at Trinity College Dublin, visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, then Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick.

His main research interests are in the epidemiology of ageing and cardiovascular disease. His current work spans traditional cohorts and patient registries, clinical audits and routine electronic health records, and he previously worked with a number of cohort studies in Europe and the US, most notably The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, the European Male Ageing Study and the Health Aging and Body Composition Study.

Matthew leads the epidemiology strand and data analysis team for the Stroke research group at King’s, centred on the South London Stroke Register and the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme. This work particularly focuses on inequalities in incidence, care and outcomes, and the long-term health of stroke survivors. He supervises researchers and PhD students working on research questions around stroke, frailty, rehabilitation and cardiometabolic diseases using various datasets.

As School Lead for Postgraduate Research (PGR), he has overall leadership of PGR activities for the community of PhD and MDRes students in the School of Life Course and Population Health Sciences.

His work has been funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the Stroke Association, the Centre for Ageing Research and Development in Ireland and the American Federation for Aging Research.