Kerry Avery (BSc, PhD, FHEA) is an Associate Professor in Applied Health and Care Research in the, Bristol Medical School (Department of Population Health Sciences), University of Bristol. She is a research methodologist who seeks to develop transformative, patient-centred methodological innovations to drive up the quality of surgical research and improve patient outcomes. She has expertise in developing patient-reported outcome measures, electronic patient-reported outcome systems, core outcome sets, recruitment interventions, and research guidelines to ensure studies are designed and outcomes are measured that are relevant to decision-makers/patients, generating high-quality surgical evidence, and improving research efficiency.

With a particular focus on complex interventions, Kerry has over 20 years’ experience of applying mixed research methods to designing and evaluating early-phase studies, feasibility/pilot studies, and randomised controlled trials (RCT) of surgical procedures and devices, and is co-applicant on the NIHR HTA Sunflower, ROMIO, and TADPOLE trials. She also has expertise in developing innovations to support patient and surgical care pathways, as chief investigator of the NIHR ROSE trial, co-applicant on the NIHR ALPACA study, and through her contributions to the NIHG PGfAR eRAPID study.

Kerry is based at the NIHR Bristol Biomedical Research Centre (www.bristolbrc.nihr.ac.uk/) and Royal College of Surgeons Bristol Surgical Trials Centre (www.bristol.ac.uk/social-community-medicine/centres/surgical-research), where she co-leads workstreams that seek to unite surgical and research communities by collaborating with NHS, university, and BRC partners to develop new methods to promote incremental evidence generation and improve the safety, transparency, and translation of surgical innovations into clinical practice.

Being strongly invested in team science, Kerry also collaborates locally, nationally, and internationally, for example with the European Organisation for the Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC),  the Core Outcomes Measures for Effectiveness Trials (COMET) initiative, and on World Health Organisation-sponsored projects. She also jointly-established and co-leads the Outcomes Working Group of the MRC-NIHR Trials Methodology Research Partnership.

Kerry is also passionate about patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) in research, leading PPIE in the NIHR Surgical and Peri-Operative Care Translational Research Collaboration and several large NIHR trials.