Simon Ball is a consultant nephrologist at University Hospitals Birmingham and the Senior Responsible Owner for the West Midlands Secure Data Environment. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham, Senior Science Adviser at HDRUK, Co-Director of the West Midlands Living Laboratory and a Principal Investigator for Cities@Heart. 

He trained in medicine at the Oxford University, University College London and Imperial College London, where he completed postgraduate clinical training in immunology, nephrology and transplantation. His research initially focused on the development and evaluation of novel immunological biomarkers in transplantation and on establishing ABO-incompatible kidney transplantation in the United Kingdom, leading the first UK multi-centre outcome study.  This led to a long-standing collaboration with the Alberta Transplant Institute,  evaluating blood group antigen specific antibodies.

Simon served as President of the British Renal Society from 2013 to 2016, leading its mission to advance patient-centred, multi-professional care. He was Chief Medical Officer at University Hospitals Birmingham from 2019-2024, providing senior medical leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, publishing early observations on the significance of ethnicity in hospitalised patient outcomes, and subsequently giving evidence on that experience to the UK Covid-19 enquiry.  

Simon has made significant contributions to digital transformation in Birmingham. He contributed to, then clinically led development of the secondary care electronic health record by the Wolfson Computer Laboratory. During this time, he also served as clinical adviser on electronic prescribing to NHS Connecting for Health.

Building on this experience, he promoted collaborations between clinicians, informaticians and data scientists to unlock the value of deep, longitudinal healthcare data. This work demonstrated how routinely collected data can be harnessed to improve care, accelerate research, and inform transformation. He went on to lead the Health Data Research UK (HDR-UK) Midlands consortium as Research Director between 2018-2023, and in 2025 he rejoined HDR-UK team for a term as Senior Science Adviser. 

His longstanding commitment to advancing data infrastructure for clinical care, quality improvement and research has led to the development of the West Midlands Secure Data Environment and the West Midlands Living Laboratory. These programmes support innovation using privacy-preserving data infrastructure to support AI-enabled research, learning health systems and the evaluation and adoption of digital health technologies.