Fiona Godlee (born August 4, 1961) has been
editor in chief of the
BMJ since 2005. Educated at
Bedales, she qualified as a doctor in 1985 at the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, having studied at
Trinity College, Cambridge, then trained as a general physician in London, and is a Fellow of the
Royal College of Physicians. Since joining the
BMJ in 1990 she has written on a broad range of issues, including the impact of environmental degradation on health, the future of the World Health Organisation, the ethics of academic publication, and the problems of editorial peer review.
In 1994 she spent a year at
Harvard University as a Harkness Fellow evaluating efforts to bridge the gap between medical research and practice. On returning to the
UK, she led the development of BMJ Clinical Evidence, which evaluates the best available evidence on the benefits and harms of treatments and is now provided worldwide to over a million clinicians in 9 languages. In 2000 she moved to Current Science Group to help establish the open access online publisher BioMedCentral as Editorial Director for Medicine. In 2003 she returned to the BMJ Group to head up its new Knowledge division. She has served as President of the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) and Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and is co-editor of Peer Review in Health Sciences. She lives in
Cambridge with her husband and two children. Her paternal grandmother was born Barbara Lodge, youngest of the six daughters of the physicist
Sir Oliver Lodge. On her paternal grandfather's side, she is a great great great grand daughter of
Joseph Jackson Lister, pioneer of the compound microscope and father of
Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister.