The Distributed University for Sustainable Higher Education

Emeritus Professor Richard Heller has a medical degree and doctorate from the University of London, United Kingdom. He was Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Community Medicine, and Director of The Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and consultant general physician at the John Hunter Hospital until the year 2000. From there, he was Professor of Public Health in the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, until his retirement in 2006. Richard has had a leadership role in the International Clinical Epidemiology Network, an organisation originally funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, for capacity building in medical schools across the developing world, and developed a distance learning masters course in the University of Newcastle. He subsequently built a fully online masters course in Public Health at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. Richard was also the founder and coordinator of the People's Open Access Education Initiative (Peoples-uni), which aimed to provide Public Health capacity building in developing countries at low cost, through e-learning using open access resources on the Internet, and leading to an MPH degree. His research interests have been in the causes and prevention of heart disease, the implementation of evidence-based practice, and developing measures to describe the population impact of disease risks and the benefits of interventions.