Ronan Lyons, Clinical Professor of Public Health at Swansea University, is internationally recognised for leadership in innovative use of health data to address important public health questions. As founding director of the Welsh Secure Anonymised Information Linkage databank, he has succeeded in linking an exceptional breadth and depth of individual-level data for an entire population across their life course. This has enabled rapid access to comprehensive data to inform the work of SAGE and NERVTAG. He established the UK Secure eResearch Platform – a secure infrastructure for research using complex multimodal data - which has fundamentally changed the nature of, and opportunities for, distributed team science across the UK and internationally.