Biography

Richard Smith worked at the British Medical Journal for 25 years, serving as editor in chief of the BMJ and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group from 1991 to 2004.  He has written for dozens of journals and has written widely for the lay press in addition to the BMJ, and has received three awards for journalism to date.  He now blogs regularly for the BMJ, and his book, “The Trouble with Medical Journals,” summarises what he learned in his years as an editor.

Smith is a member of the board of the Public Library of Science, which aims to make all research open access, the editor of Cases Journal (a journal that aimed to publish tens of thousands of case reports a year and gather them in a database), is chair of the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee, and a member of the UK Panel on Research Integrity. 

He currently is the director of the UnitedHealth Chronic Disease Initiative, which together with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has created 11 centres in low and middle income countries that work on non-communicable disease.

An honorary professor at Imperial College London and the University of Warwick, Smith chair of the board of Patients Know Best (a start up that uses information technology to improve doctor patient partnership) and a member of the board of ICDDR,B (formerly International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh).

Click here to read Richard Smith's blog.