After qualifying in medicine, Ian Harvey worked in general medicine before becoming a Wellcome Trust lecturer in clinical epidemiology at the University of Wales College of Medicine. Drawn by the developing area of evidence based medicine he has since become prominent in the design and execution of pragmatic non-pharmaceutical randomised trials, which includes the recent development of the Norwich Clinical Trials Unit. His research funding has originated from diverse sources including the National Institute of Health Research and the MRC.

After Senior Lecturer positions in the medical schools in Cardiff and Bristol, he moved to a Chair in Epidemiology and Public Health at UEA in 1998, later becoming Associate Dean for Research (2004) and Dean of the Health Faculty (2008).

He has led the development of three Research Institutes within the Health Faculty and the submission of the Faculty’s six RAE submissions. He has been a member of the RAE 2008 subpanel for Epidemiology and Public Health, was for four years Deputy Chair of the MRC’s Health Services and Public Health Research Board, and now sits on the NIHR Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) funding committee.