Meet Brandy Coote, helping shape OHT's next chapter 🥳

We are so excited to welcome Brandy Coote as our new Co-Director. Brandy isn't new to OHT. She's been part of our community as a Fellow, helping build connections, champion inclusive innovation and co-found OHT Oxford. Now she'll be helping lead the next chapter of our global, volunteer-powered community of communities.

Brandy has spent over two decades working across health research, innovation, data, governance and delivery. Her career has taken her through the NHS, academia, national research infrastructure, industry partnerships and independent consultancy - often operating in the complicated space between a promising idea and what it takes to make that idea work in the real world.

In other words, she is very familiar with the meetings, spreadsheets, relationships, negotiations and occasional controlled chaos behind meaningful change. Extremely OHT.

Brandy’s work has consistently focused on bringing people, organisations and disciplines together around shared problems. She has supported major research and innovation programmes, set up national networks focused on the delivery of clinical trials,  developed collaborations between researchers, health systems and industry, and helped teams turn ambitious strategies into practical delivery models.

She brings particular experience in clinical research, data-enabled health innovation, dementia research, inclusive innovation and research capacity-building. Across all of that work, the same questions keep coming up:

• Who is missing from the conversation?

• What will it take for this idea to work in practice?

• How do we build something that works, where people genuinely want to belong and shape?

These questions sit at the heart of One Health Tech.

Alongside all that experience, Brandy brings the kind of energy that fills a room. She is endlessly curious, generous with her time, quick to connect people and genuinely excited by what can happen when communities come together around a shared challenge. Which, if you've ever been to an OHT event, probably sounds rather familiar.

Finding her people

Brandy’s relationship with OHT has grown through its communities, events and collaborations, including her work in co-founding our OHT Oxford hub alongside OHT Fellow Zoya Yasmine. Most recently, she chaired its Investing in Inclusive Innovation panel, bringing founders, investors and accessibility advocates together to explore what it means to build equity into health innovation from the beginning...not as a feature added when everything else has already been decided.

Ask Brandy what OHT does best, and she'll tell you it's this: creating spaces where people who would not normally meet can share expertise, challenge assumptions, make generous introductions and start building something useful together.

“What has always stood out to me about One Health Tech is that it understands community is not an optional extra. It is infrastructure that is essential to build trust, confidence, collaboration, learning and change.

“OHT makes room for people working between disciplines, people with lived and local knowledge, people who are quietly making things happen and people who may not yet see themselves as leaders. I am incredibly excited to help strengthen that community and ensure more people can belong, contribute, build and lead.”

Community with purpose

As Co-Director, Brandy will help steward OHT’s strategy to find your people, build community and shape health innovation.

Her role will include supporting the Community Building Fellows, volunteers and local and thematic communities that make OHT what it is; building sustainable partnerships; strengthening the systems and support behind the community; and helping community knowledge travel further into research, policy, products and practice.

This work will be guided by OHT’s three Ps:

People: backing voices too often unheard and creating routes into connection, confidence and leadership.

Products: helping ensure health technologies and services are shaped by more perspectives and work fairly in real life.

Practice: demonstrating better ways of working through ethics, co-design, collaboration and meaningful involvement.

Brandy is particularly interested in helping OHT translate its distinctive community-building model into new opportunities: supporting emerging leaders, developing communities of practice, connecting people across sectors and turning collective insight into practical resources and wider influence.

She is also committed to protecting what makes OHT recognisably OHT as it grows: warmth, openness, generosity, experimentation, low ego and a healthy resistance to unnecessary gatekeeping.

“The opportunity is not to turn OHT into a more conventional organisation. It is to give our communities and community builders the support, visibility and infrastructure they need without losing the humanity, flexibility and joyful messiness that make OHT special.

“I want us to be serious about impact without becoming stiff, structured without becoming top-down, and ambitious without building a model that relies on burnout-powered heroics.”

The next chapter

Over the coming months, Brandy is excited to be listening to and working with Fellows, volunteers, members, partners and community leads across OHT.

There is much to build on: a decade of outstanding grassroots leadership, place-based and thematic communities, a growing Community Building Fellowship and thousands of people who have found collaborators, opportunities, confidence and belonging through OHT.

Brandy is committed to helping the next chapter focus on supporting that energy more sustainably and helping it travel further.

We are so excited to have Brandy alongside us as we build what comes next, together. Welcome to the role, Brandy. 💖