Rod Jackson is a professor of epidemiology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He trained in medicine and completed his PhD in epidemiology at the University of Auckland and is a fellow of the New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine. He has over 35 years of research experience in cardiovascular disease epidemiology and in teaching epidemiological methods. His CVD research covers both public health and clinical epidemiological fields. For the past 20 years his research has been increasingly focused on CVD risk prediction and its application in clinical practice. He leads a ‘big-health data’ research programme that generates very large cohort studies from web-based clinical decision support systems in primary and secondary care. He has published over 300 peers reviewed papers.