Dr. Anne River

Assistant Director Insight and Evaluation

National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR)

Anne is an Assistant Director of Insight and Evaluation at the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR), which is seeking to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research. Anne oversees teams undertaking monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL), data analytics, data science and research information provision. Anne’s MEL team works with other teams within NIHR to support programme, scheme and initiative level monitoring, evaluation and learning activity, using theories of change and logic models to guide process evaluations and outcome evaluations that enable them to evidence their impact. Anne also works closely with four other Impact Programme leads from across other parts of NIHR to oversee NIHR’s organisational level monitoring, evaluation and learning activity, facilitating learning across the complex system of NIHR and enabling NIHR to evidence its impact.

Prior to her current role Anne led the first two phases of the co-development of the NIHR Outcomes Framework in collaboration with over 400 partners and stakeholders across NIHR, government, the research community, health and social care system, patients and the public.The framework is a statement of NIHR’s intended outcomes and a tool for tracking progress to support organisational learning. Anne has held multiple other roles within the research sector, including analytical roles at RAND Europe, MQ and the Wellcome Trust, and prior to this as Head of the Laboratory of Behavioural Genetics at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. Anne has  PhD in Neuroscience and more recently has achieved a Postgraduate Diploma in Behaviour Change from UCL. Anne is interested in taking an outcomes-focused approach to organisational learning and drawing on behavioural science, systems thinking and system dynamics methods to enable a context-sensitive approach to organisational learning that enables timely and fit for purpose provision of insight.