Professor Richard Neal

About me:

Richard joined the University of Exeter in 2021, after working at the University of Leeds five years as Professor of Primary Care Oncology. He continues to collaborate with Leeds on a number of projects and holds a Visiting Professorship there. Prior to this he was Professor of Primary Care Medicine at Bangor University. He has 20+ years of experience of research in cancer detection and diagnosis in community settings. He is a GP at St Leonard’s Practice in one day a week. He is Director of APEx (the Exeter Collaboration for Academic Primary Care) and the lead for Exeter’s membership of the NIHR School for Primary Care Research.

Richard is interested in all aspects of the interface between cancer and primary care/general practice, and in particular the early detection and diagnosis of cancer. His current portfolio of work spans screening (The NHS-Galleri Trial, and the Yorkshire Lung Screening Trial and associated studies), primary care diagnosis (the recently completed CanTest Collaborative portfolio), policy research (the recently completed DHSE Policy Research Unit for Cancer Screening Awareness and Early Diagnosis), developing and testing an intervention aimed to get GPs to think about the possibility of cancer sooner and more often (the ThinkCancer trial), and technological innovation (ongoing collaboration with Pinpoint Data Science). He is interested in developing work in application of cancer diagnostics and treatment in low-resource settings. He is also keen to work with industrial partners on the evaluation of new diagnostics and diagnostic approaches to cancer detection.

• MBChB (Birmingham)
• PhD (Leeds)
• FRCGP
• FHEA