Areas of special personal interest include health and bioethics, science, community safety, environmental issues, Northern Ireland, and broadcasting.

Health and bioethics

Through his membership of a consensus conference which helped change breast cancer treatment Nick Ross has become progressively more involved with a wide array of health issues, and was a member of the Committee on the Ethics of Gene Therapy and the Gene Therapy Advisory Committee, and a director of the Health Quality Service. He was until recently on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences inquiry into the use of non-human primates in research. He currently sits on other medical and ethics boards including that of the Royal College of Physicians.He was a member of the NHS National Plan Taskforce and is President of HealthWatch. He is involved in promoting clinical trials (see www.lindalliance.org), challenging orthodox and "alternative" treatments which cannot be shown to be effective, and advancing the cause of accountability and transparency in health rationing. He has chaired many meetings for the BMA, DH and NHS as well as international meetings of specialist clinicians in varied fields such rheumatology, allergology, and paediatric endocrinology.

Science

Nick Ross helped to change the climate of science reporting in the early 90s with an influential series of articles critical of media portrayal of science, and has been a member of the Committee on Public Understanding of Science and twice chairman of the Science Book Prize. He is a Trustee of Sense About Science and a Guest Director of the 2008 Cheltenham Science Festival, the largest public science meeting in the world. He is a regular speaker at science meetings, is a supporter of the Campbell Collaboration, the international partnership to improve scientific methodology in the social sciences, and he founded the new discipline of crime science. He is a visiting professor of crime science at UCL.

Crime prevention and security

Nick Ross coined the term 'crime science' to mark out a new evidence-based focus on crime reduction. He gave the Police Foundation Lecture jointly with the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, and inspired the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London, where he is chairman of the board. His approach is a substantial shift of emphasis from conventional reliance on the criminal justice system. He is a regular speaker and adviser on crime reduction, terrorism and security, and was influential in the earliest national adoption of targets to reduce crime. He has worked with the EC and others to establish a new business-led campaign against crime, and is an Honorary Fellow of UCL and of the Academy of Experimental Criminology.

Fire prevention

Ross was invited by fire chiefs and fire industry experts to advise on a new campaign for reducing death and injury through fire in the UK. He compiled new and ambitious new targets for fire safety which were adopted by FOBFO (the body that represents the UK's Fire Organisations) and CFOA (the Chief Fire Officers Association), and have the support of the Local Government Association. He proposed the development of a radical new approach to fire suppression (such as sprinklers) which is currently being tested by the UK government. It will have such a low cost-point that it will become a standard feature in all domestic housing.

Environment

He is an Ambassador for the World Wildlife Fund, and has worked for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office on environmental issues in British Overseas Territories.

Road safety

In the 1980s Nick Ross produced and directed an influential programme The biggest epidemic of our times which led to him lobbying highway engineers and the government to introduce challenging targets for savings in road casualties. He became chairman of RoSPA's National Road Safety Committee. His targets were accepted (4,000 deaths - down from over 5,500 pa - by the year 2000) and substantially as a result of that momentum the in recent years the death toll has been under 3,500, almost half the average for the previous shalf century and the lowest since records began. The UK now has among the world's safest roads, and because of that British mortality rates to the age of 50 are among the lowest in the world. Another of his road safety series was called So You Think You're a Good Driver. He is a Vice President of the Institute of Advanced Motorists and President of the London Accident Prevention Council and has campaigned for several new road safety initiatives.

Northern Ireland

Nick Ross was a student leader and civil rights campaigner in the late 1960s and continues to have an interest in Northern Ireland affairs. His autobiographical account of the start of the present trouble won a best documentary award. Take a look through the broadcasting section to find out more about this, and Nick's other television and radio work. In 2002 he received an honorary doctorate from Queen's University Belfast.

Broadcasting

Although most of his work has been for the BBC Nick Ross has long challenged some of the key orthodoxies of public service broadcasting. Five years before the Burns Inquiry reached similar conclusions he warned that in a multichannel environment the licence fee would become progressively unsustainable, that those concerned for the welfare of public service broadcasting must look for new ways of raising revenue, especially subscription, and that the BBC should have a greater focus on areas of market failure. The RSA published his proposals in 2002. He predicted the dangers of ITV's reliance on advertising in the fast-forward age, and championed some of the reforms since adopted by the BBC in reducing its vertical integration. He has chaired meetings between the Ofcom Content Board and broadcasters, organised by the Voice of the Listener & Viewer.

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