Iain Brennan is a chartered research psychologist, Professor of Criminology and the Institutional Lead for Open Research at University of Hull where he has worked since 2010.

For 15 years, he has been conducting and publishing research on perpetrators and victims of violent crime, weapon-carrying behaviour and criminal justice intervention. He has published over 40 articles, books and chapters, attracted over £5m in grant income.

Iain has worked with cross-sectional and longitudinal/panel data, including the Crime Survey for England and Wales and the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey, as well as a variety of linked routinely-collected police and health record data sets, longitudinal surveys and other police data sets. He is an advisor on violence prevention to a range of governmental bodies and NGOs including Home Office, Youth Endowment Fund, and several police forces.

"We have long believed that the seeds of violence are sown in the early life and educational experiences of young people today. The linkage of government data sets now permits us to model the causes of violence from early in life in a way that has never been possible in the UK.

The potential of these data sets for uncovering the causes of and solutions to youth violence and other societal problems are phenomenal but with this potential comes risks that must be acknowledged by the research community. Emerging insights in causal inference from computer science and epidemiology emphasise that we must more carefully consider our research questions, understand the provenance of our data and the populations the data sets represent.

I am delighted to be working with ADR-UK to support the next generation of researchers to unlock the promised of administrative data and to produce trustworthy, reproducible research that best serves society."