Vishnu Chandrabalan

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals

Professor Chandrabalan is a Consultant Surgeon and Head of Data Science at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals. He also serves as the Chief Clinical Information Officer for the Lancashire and South Cumbria Secure Data Environment.

With dual expertise as both a practicing clinician and passionate technologist, he leads multiple large-scale digital initiatives that have transformed healthcare data utilisation for research across the region. His team have established one of NHS's first Kubernetes-based research and analytics environments and, working closely with Prof. Jo Knight, he has extended the collaboration with Lancaster University from data science to research software engineering.

He spearheads the region's data harmonisation efforts for Real World Evidence (RWE), which earned his team the prestigious Health Data Research UK Team of the Year award for their exceptional contribution to healthcare analytics and data standardization. He is a member of the UK's first RWE network as well as the global OHDSI RWE network.

His leadership has secured over £4 million in competitive funding, enabling his team to build critical data and analytics infrastructure that serves both research analytics and operational intelligence.

Prof. Chandrabalan exemplifies the modern clinician-technologist: combining clinical expertise with deep insight into cloud and data technologies to architect innovative solutions that transform data-driven research and outcomes.