Professor of Primary Healthcare Tony Avery of the School of Medicine has received his OBE from Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace.

Professor Avery, a GP and Senior Investigator for the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), was honoured for services to general practice.

He said of the ceremony, which took place yesterday (30 November):

“I am very honoured to have received my OBE at Buckingham Palace and I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who have worked with me to help make the use of medicines in general practice safer for everyone.”

Professor Avery’s research focuses on patient safety in primary care, a priority area for the NHS, and he has led ground-breaking studies to identify the frequency, nature and cause of prescribing errors and avoidable harm in primary care.

He has developed and evaluated a range of interventions that have led to improvements in patient safety. A pharmacist-led information-technology-based intervention (PINCER), reduced prescribing errors in general practice in a large, cluster-randomised trial and has now been rolled out to more than 2,500 general practices across England. As a result, over 20,000 patients have benefitted from safer prescriptions.

After completing his undergraduate medical degree at the University of Sheffield in 1986, Professor Avery completed his GP training in Nottingham, and has been a clinical academic at the University of Nottingham since 1992. He was appointed as the Director of Research for the School of Medicine at Nottingham in 2013 and was Dean and Head of Nottingham School of Medicine from 2015-2019. Professor Avery also works as a GP at a surgery in Chilwell, Nottingham.

Professor Avery is among three University of Nottingham academics in the New Year Honours 2022. Jonathan Van Tam, Professor of Health Protection in the School of Medicine, and one of the most recognisable faces from the scientific response to the Covid-19 pandemic, received a knighthood.

Professor Van Tam specialises in influenza, epidemiology, transmission, vaccinology and pandemic preparedness. He is an alumnus of the university and graduated from the School of Medicine in 1987.

A previous recipient of an MBE, he become a familiar face during Downing Street briefings on Covid-19 while seconded to the Department of Health as a Deputy Chief Medical Officer. Professor Van Tam is now Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Nottingham.

Professor Robert Mokaya was recognised with an OBE for services to the chemical sciences. Joining as an EPSRC Advanced Fellow, he has built an extensive 16-year career at Nottingham and is now Professor of Materials Chemistry and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement.

Professor Mokaya heads up a world-leading research group on sustainable energy materials and valorisation of carbon feedstocks and publishing 175 articles with more than 13,000 citations. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a founding member of the RSC Pan Africa Chemistry Network, vastly improving African chemists’ access to, and the impact of, chemical knowledge in countries across the continent.