Richard is a global health researcher. He has pioneered methods and processes for community codesign, intervention development (Ophelia) and many questionnaires (COAs/PROs/PREMs). His work is being implemented in 85+ countries to improve health and equity. He holds a prestigious Australian Government NHMRC Investigator Award (L3).

The impact of his work is far-reaching, driven by bottom-up and top-down co-design processes to generate needed, wanted, implementable, and scalable health system improvements. He co-leads, with Sante publique France, Work Package 6 Health Literacy, EU Commission co-funded JACARDI (Joint Action of Heart Disease and Diabetes) initiative, implementing the Ophelia (Optimising Health Literacy and Access) process in 24 projects in 12 countries. 

In collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), his team built the concept of Health Literacy Development, resulting in the influential 2022 WHO report “Health Literacy Development for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases”. It is a "why-do" - "how-to-do" process for countries to implement. It is classified as a WHO Global Public Health Good. He created WHO National Health Literacy Development Projects (NHLDPs) applied in 17 countries.

Richard provides capacity development in Ophelia and community-co-design across low- and high-income countries. 

He advisers governments, NGOs and the WHO on NCDs, health literacy, and surveys. He is listed as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (top 1% most influential researchers globally) and holds Honorary Professor positions at Copenhagen University, Denmark, and NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal.

Richard also works directly with communities across diverse countries. This success is due to his commitment to high-quality relationships, listening, and focusing on serving the needs of stakeholders to enable them to achieve scalable local and regional impacts. He balances his exceptional knowledge of scientific methods across many fields with practical evidence-based decision-making.

He supervises PhD scholars seeking to become public health leaders.

Tools implemented: 
•    HLQ: Health Literacy Questionnaire
•    eHLQ
•    CHAT: Conversational Health Literacy Assessment Tool
•    heiQ: Health Education Impact Questionnaire
•    Ophelia (Optimising Health Literacy and Access) process
•    FluiiQ: Influenza Impact and Intensity Questionnaire

•    RiiQ Respiratory Intensity and Impact Questionnaire