Professor Jeremy Fairbank

Professor Jeremy Fairbank is an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College and Professor of Spinal Surgery at the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology, and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford. He is a retired spinal surgeon from Oxford University Hospitals.

Prior to becoming an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton in 2023, he had already served as a college adviser for a number of years.

Jeremy graduated from Cambridge University and St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London. He was trained in a Spine Fellowship at Oswestry, where he wrote his MD thesis on the facet joint. He moved to an orthopaedic rotation based at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, that included time in Norwich, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, as well as a six month Fellowship in Dallas, Texas.

He published the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) in 1980, which has grown into a near on universally used outcome measure in spinal disorders. He moved to Oxford in 1989. He developed and led the MRC Spine Stabilisation Trial, which has had international impact in comparing the outcome of intensive rehabilitation in the management of chronic low back pain versus spinal fusion.

Jeremy has been Secretary of the Society for Back Pain Research, President of British Scoliosis Society, President of International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine and Chair of United Kingdom Spine Societies Board. He has been a member of the NIHR HTA Interventions Panel since 2014.