Julian McCrae

Deputy Director of IDS Strategy, Office for National Statistics

Julian leads the Integrated Data Service (IDS) Strategy at the Office for National Statistics. He is responsible for ensuring the emerging Service meets its core goal - the greater availability of ready-to-use linked data for public good analysis.

He began his career at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), where he led the IFS’ research programme on corporate taxation. In other roles he has taught public economics at University College London and helped expand the public policy practice at Frontier Economics.

Julian has held the position of Deputy Director of the Institute for Government as well as Deputy Director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit. Julian's experience in government also includes two spells at the Treasury, and a period at the Department for Work and Pensions.

Emily Oliver

Head of Research & Capacity Building, Administrative Data Research (ADR) UK Strategic Hub

Emily is responsible for leading on training and capacity building activities within the ADR UK Strategic Hub to drive up the use of administrative data for research. 

By engaging with stakeholders including data owners across Whitehall departments, researchers and supervisors, and with those working within Trusted Research Environments, she has devised a training strategy comprising courses led by experts, online resources, and ADR UK’s first cohort of PhD studentships.

In addition, she chairs a cross-organisational Synthetic Data Working Group and is coordinating a suite of projects exploring synthetic data as a tool for smoothing the researcher journey to using administrative data.

Prabhat Vaze

Director of Economics, Belmana

Prabhat has over 20 years experience as an economist working in consultancy, government departments and academia. His areas of expertise are analysis for programme and project management, strategy development, economic appraisal and evaluation of policies using complex datasets. 

He has worked in productivity economics, defence, transport and official statistics. His studies using the ONS Secure Research Service have focused on evaluating policies to support businesses.

Before setting up Belmana, during a decade in the UK senior civil service, Prabhat was Director of Analysis at the Ministry of Defence, Chief Economist at the Office for National Statistics and Senior Economist at the Department for Transport.

Tom Jackson

Climate Change Monitoring and Evaluation Adviser for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

Tom has previously worked as a Government Social Researcher at the Ministry of Justice, where his team won the Linked Administrative Data Award at the ONS’ Research Excellence Awards in 2022.

This work used linked administrative datasets from across the justice system and collaboration with other government departments to provide powerful new insights on justice system users, their pathways, and outcomes across a range of public services.

Graham Knox  

Head of the Data Services Unit within the Department for Work and Pensions

Graham is head of the Data Services Unit within the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). His teams support the data needs of DWP analysts, and lead on data sharing for research.

He’s been a Government Statistician for over 20 years, having spent much of his career in the Department for Education (DfE) and DWP.

Graham has carried out more traditional Statistician-type roles but now spends more of his time focussing on wider data sharing and how we can enable access to DWP data for research, working closely with data sharing colleagues across Government, the ONS and ADR UK.