Clare Griffiths (statistician)

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Clare Griffiths
Alma mater University College London
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Scientific career
Institutions UK Health Security Agency
Public Health England
Office for National Statistics

Clare Griffiths is a British statistician who is head of the UK COVID-19 dashboard at the UK Health Security Agency, previously known as Public Health England. She specialises in mortality statistics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Griffiths provided the daily COVID statistics for the United Kingdom.

Contents

Early life and education

Griffiths studied at Manchester High School for Girls and continued her studies with a degree of human sciences at University College London. She moved to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine as a graduate student, where she completed a masters degree in medical demography. [1]

Career

In 1998, Griffiths joined the Office for National Statistics [1] as a researcher. She served as Head of Mortality Analysis at the Office for National Statistics from 2004. [1]

Griffiths joined Public Health England at its formation in 2013, leading work on the Public Health Outcomes Framework. She was made Head of the Profession for Statistics in 2019. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Griffiths was invited to join the COVID-19 dashboard team. [2] [3] She said that even before being asked she had already started wondering how big data could be used to inform public policy. [2] She became responsible for the Government of the United Kingdom's COVID dashboard, which reported data on the daily number of cases, deaths and vaccinations. [4] The data is released daily at 16:00. [2] [5]

In 2021, the I newspaper described Griffiths' dashboard as being more clear and detailed than any other COVID dashboard. [6]

Selected publications

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "Clare Griffiths - UK Health Security Agency". ukhsa.blog.gov.uk. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 "Statistics are vital: An interview with Clare Griffiths". RSS. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  3. "Explore the Data: The UK Covid-19 Dashboard". the-sra.org.uk. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  4. "BBC Radio 4 - More or Less: Behind the Stats, In praise of Covid Data". BBC. 27 March 2021. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  5. "Behind the scenes of the coronavirus dashboard - the government's most popular ever web page". inews.co.uk. 12 February 2021. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  6. "The female 'data lads' crunching Covid numbers and keeping us informed through the pandemic". inews.co.uk. 21 December 2021. Retrieved 21 December 2021.