Four Founders.
One Shared Conviction.
IHRI was licensed by the Malta Further and Higher Education Authority in 2025. What makes it distinctive is who built it — four people from radically different professional worlds, united by a single conviction: that the most important health research is research that practitioners can actually use, and that the most effective doctoral education meets professionals in the complexity of their actual working lives.
Co-Founders
MFHEA Licensed
Accredited Programmes
Research Nodes
How IHRI Came to Be
Dr. Andrew Hodgers and Nicole Foster came together to co-found IHRI — two practitioners whose careers had taken them into demanding, complex, high-stakes environments from very different angles. But the moment their paths converged was not accidental. Both were working in Malta, alongside another higher education college, supporting its transformation to professional academic levels — designing governance structures, quality frameworks, and programmes at Masters and doctoral level in Global Health and Health Studies.
That work was formative in a specific way. It put both of them inside the challenge of building health education infrastructure from the ground up — navigating MFHEA regulatory requirements, designing programme architectures that could serve health professionals at the highest academic levels, and establishing the quality assurance systems that a licensed HEI demands. When IHRI was established, neither its regulatory approach nor its health science focus was new territory. Both had been built and tested in that prior work.
Dr. Hodgers brought to that collaboration a career combining three decades of senior commercial and industrial leadership with two decades at the intersection of professional practice and doctoral-level education — the latter beginning with his co-founding of the Irish Centre for Work Based Learning in 2003 together with Middlesex University, alongside Professor Noel Mulcahy and Nick Hodgers. His commercial background spans his role as Director of European Operations of InPower Europe Ltd (a NATO-standard Kollmorgen Corporation subsidiary), directing cross-border programmes with Thales, Leonardo, Dassault Aviation, and DASA, and a senior engagement at Accenture UKI. As the Irish Centre's work expanded internationally with leading global corporations, it evolved into the Centre for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS). Operating within the Middlesex academic framework over two decades, the team produced fifteen Doctors and twenty-seven Masters across high-consequence transnational industrial and professional environments. That body of work, and its underlying pedagogical framework, is the direct foundation on which IHRI's programmes were designed. Dr. Hodgers' full professional history is documented on his personal professional profile.
Nicole Foster brought something different and equally essential: operational and clinical leadership across four continents in some of the most demanding environments on earth — military operations, remote industrial sites, humanitarian emergencies — combined with the governance and quality systems expertise required to run a regulated institution. She is dual-registered as a paramedic and nurse, holds a Master of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine, one of the most demanding clinical credentials in extreme environment medicine.
They were joined by two scientists whose backgrounds opened dimensions that neither health education nor health systems research typically reaches. Dr. Manavi Jadhav — a cosmochemist and laboratory astrophysicist who had held postdoctoral positions at the Field Museum of Natural History, the University of Chicago, and the University of Hawai'i, built a research laboratory from scratch at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with NSF fellowship funding, and recovered meteorites from the Antarctic ice sheet as a field member of the ANSMET programme — brought a methodology for reconciling signals across radically different environmental contexts that became the intellectual foundation of IHRI's cross-domain health research programme.
And Dr. Sabrina Poradosú — a medical doctor with dual board specialisations in internal medicine and endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism, and a Master of Science in Space Studies from KU Leuven — brought the clinical precision and space medicine training to lead IHRI's research into HPA-axis stress signalling and allostatic load measurement across orbital, Antarctic, and high-consequence operational environments.
What the four share is not a common professional background — it is a common orientation. Each of them has spent their career in environments where the gap between what research produces and what practice requires is not theoretical. It is operational. It has consequences. IHRI was built to close that gap, in health science specifically, at doctoral level.
Why Health Science?
The Work-Based Learning model works across professions. We chose health science deliberately — because this is where the gap between what practitioners know and what their qualifications reflect is widest, most consequential, and most urgently in need of a solution.
The Gap We Identified
Every major health system in the world is led by people whose formal qualifications do not reflect what they actually know. An EMS chief with twenty years of system design experience. A hospital COO who rebuilt a quality infrastructure after a critical incident. A public health director who managed a pandemic response at the front line. These are people doing doctoral-level work every day — without a framework to formalise, validate, or build on it.
That gap has always existed. But it took a pandemic to make it impossible to ignore.
The Covid Catalyst
During COVID-19, the world watched health leaders make life-and-death decisions at extraordinary speed, under conditions no classroom had ever prepared them for, drawing on knowledge that no credential recognised. Paramedic chiefs redesigning entire service architectures overnight. Hospital administrators managing clinical surge while maintaining governance. Public health professionals translating incomplete evidence into operational policy in real time.
The pandemic did not create the knowledge gap. It revealed it — at a scale and with a visibility that made the absence of any formal pathway to validate and advance that knowledge impossible to justify. IHRI was designed to close it.
The Answer — The Doctor of Health Science
The DHS empowers practitioners to become leaders in shaping the future of healthcare. It does not ask candidates to study someone else's problems — it builds directly on what they already know, focusing their existing experience and professional depth on a research challenge that matters to their own area of practice.
Candidates specialise in a healthcare area that aligns with their professional interests — whether that is health data analysis, medical devices, healthcare administration, quality improvement, or health promotion. Every pathway leads to the same outcome: rigorous doctoral-level knowledge applied directly to real health system challenges.
A practical, real-world research project as the doctoral thesis — directly addressing current challenges and opportunities in the candidate's own healthcare context.
Flexible online delivery that integrates seamlessly with professional commitments — no residency, no fixed class times, no career interruption.
Bespoke one-to-one supervision — personalised academic guidance calibrated to the candidate's specific professional context and research challenge.
An interdisciplinary team spanning healthcare, science, business, engineering, and technology — ensuring the research draws on perspectives that transcend single-discipline thinking.
"Transform frontline experience into global impact.
Shape the health systems of tomorrow."
This is what the Doctor of Health Science is for. Not to produce academics who study health from a distance — but to produce practitioner-scholars who research the systems they lead and return that knowledge, at doctoral level, to the practice that generated it.
Not a Gap We Spotted.
A Capability We Applied.
IHRI did not emerge because its founders noticed a problem in health and decided to move in. It emerged because two people with deep, proven expertise in building frameworks for complex systems — one in planetary science, one in professional doctoral education — recognised that health is among the most complex human systems on earth, and that their methods applied to it directly.
Dr. Manavi Jadhav
Dr. Jadhav's scientific specialisation is resolving coherent meaning from signals gathered across radically different and discontinuous environments — stellar, interstellar, protosolar, meteoritic — using complementary instruments whose outputs must be reconciled into a single cross-domain framework. That is not a methodology confined to cosmochemistry. It is precisely the analytical challenge that health systems present: multiple data streams, multiple contexts, multiple scales of observation, all requiring integration into actionable knowledge.
"The method I use to reconcile signals from presolar grains across incompatible environmental contexts is structurally identical to the challenge of building a coherent health intelligence framework across orbital, Antarctic, and clinical environments. The domain changes. The analytical problem does not."
Dr. Andrew Hodgers & Nicole Foster
Dr. Hodgers' expertise is in building frameworks that allow experienced practitioners to formalise, validate, and advance the knowledge embedded in their professional practice — at doctoral level, within rigorous academic structures, without leaving the environments that generated that knowledge. That expertise was developed and proved over two decades within Middlesex University's internationally recognised Work-Based Learning network — recognised by the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education, the highest honour in the British higher education system, and designated a national Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning by HEFCE.
Before IHRI was established, both Dr. Hodgers and Nicole Foster were working together in Malta — supporting another higher education college through its transformation to professional academic levels. Together they designed governance structures, quality frameworks, and programmes at Masters and doctoral level in Global Health and Health Studies. That work placed both of them inside the specific challenge of building health education infrastructure within the MFHEA regulatory environment.
The health focus was not applied from the outside. It was forged in direct practice — designing health doctoral programmes, navigating MFHEA requirements, and building the quality systems that made it possible. IHRI was the natural next step.
Health Is the Right Domain
Health is not a profession with a gap. It is the most complex adaptive human system on the planet — one that combines biological science, organisational design, technology, policy, ethics, economics, and human behaviour at scale, under pressure, with irreversible consequences. It demands exactly the kind of multi-domain, systems-literate, practitioner-led research that the WBL doctoral model was built to produce.
And if there was a moment that made the stakes undeniable, it was COVID-19 — which put health system leaders in front of the world and revealed, at a scale impossible to overlook, that the most experienced practitioners in the system were operating without any formal framework to formalise, validate, or build on what they knew. IHRI was not founded in response to that. But it arrived at exactly the right moment.
A practical doctoral research project — addressing real challenges in the candidate's own healthcare context, not hypothetical scenarios.
Specialisation in the candidate's own area of health practice — data analysis, medical devices, administration, quality improvement, or health promotion.
Flexible online delivery that integrates with professional commitments — no residency, no career interruption, no fixed class times.
Bespoke one-to-one supervision — because a practitioner-scholar doing doctoral-level research on a real system deserves a supervisor who understands that system.
"Transform frontline experience into global impact.
Shape the health systems of tomorrow."
The DHS is not for people who want to study health from a distance. It is for people who are already changing it — and who want the doctoral framework to formalise, advance, and amplify what they know.
The Co-Founders
Work-Based Learning · Extreme Environment Medicine · Planetary Science · Space Endocrinology
Dr. Andrew Hodgers
DProf · MBA (Oxford Brookes) · Co-Founder & Director, CAPS
A career combining three decades of senior commercial and industrial leadership with two decades at the intersection of professional practice and doctoral-level education. Director of European Operations, InPower Europe Ltd (NATO-standard Kollmorgen Corporation subsidiary) — directing cross-border programmes with Thales, Leonardo, Dassault Aviation, and DASA, and leading the first sectoral ISO 9001 certification of its kind in Europe in 1989. Senior engagement, Accenture UKI. Fifteen years of independent advisory practice across health, MedTech, and manufacturing.
In 2003, co-founded the Irish Centre for Work Based Learning together with Middlesex University — alongside Professor Noel Mulcahy and Nick Hodgers. As the Centre's work expanded internationally with leading global corporations, it evolved into the Centre for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS). As Director, Dr. Hodgers led the Global Executive Leadership doctoral programme, producing fifteen Doctors and twenty-seven Masters within the Middlesex academic framework. His Doctor of Professional Studies — applying Beer's Viable Systems Model to regulatory interface design, examined by a direct associate of Stafford Beer — is the theoretical foundation of IHRI's VAIAS-ORG™ framework.
Chapter 12, Work Based Learning: Journeys to the Core of Higher Education (Middlesex University Press, 2009)
IHRI-U03-WP-2026-001 — VAIAS-ORG™ framework for AI governance architecture
Nicole Foster
MPH & Tropical Medicine · FAWM · Registered Nurse · Registered Paramedic · Co-Founder
Operational, clinical, and academic executive with extensive experience across four continents. Dual-registered paramedic and nurse specialising in remote and austere prehospital care. Fellow of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine — one of the most demanding clinical credentials in extreme environment medicine. Operational experience spans military, mining, and NGO sectors across active conflict zones, remote industrial sites, and humanitarian emergencies.
Has designed benchmarking and competency frameworks for medical and allied health professionals operating under international standards, and developed and deployed remote learning programmes for clinical education in environments where conventional face-to-face delivery is not viable.
As COO, responsible for operational and administrative integrity across both institutional pillars — with academic governance of the DHS residing with institutional academic leadership.
Fellow, Academy of Wilderness Medicine (FAWM)
Master of Public Health & Tropical Medicine
Member, Australian College of Paramedicine
Dr. Manavi Jadhav
PhD Earth & Planetary Sciences (Washington University) · Director, Space Systems, Unit 03 · Co-Founder
Cosmochemist and laboratory astrophysicist. Postdoctoral research at the Laboratory for Space Sciences (Washington University), the W.M. Keck Cosmochemistry Laboratory (University of Hawai'i), the Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. Assistant Professor of Physics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette (2018) — where she secured an NSF research fellowship and built a laboratory and research programme in isotope cosmochemistry from the ground up.
Specialises in laboratory analysis of presolar grains — stardust preserved in meteorites — using secondary ion mass spectrometry, synchrotron X-ray fluorescence, and electron microscopy. Her method for reconciling signals across radically different and discontinuous environmental contexts is the direct intellectual foundation for Unit 03's Vector A cross-domain allostatic load programme.
Field expedition member of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) — the NSF programme that recovers meteorites from the Antarctic ice sheet — with direct fieldwork experience in one of the primary analogue environments studied in IHRI's endocrine load research.
NSF Antarctic Service Medal · NSF Research Fellowship
ANSMET field expedition member — Antarctic ice sheet meteorite recovery
SIMS · RIMS · Synchrotron XRF · Electron microscopy
Dr. Sabrina Poradosú
MD · MSc Space Studies, KU Leuven · Head of Space Health & Human Factors, Unit 03 · Co-Founder
Medical doctor with over a decade of clinical experience and dual board specialisations in internal medicine and endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism. Master of Science in Space Studies from KU Leuven — one of Europe's foremost space medicine research institutions.
Research focuses on the interplay between cortisol, immune function, and metabolic changes — including insulin resistance — in astronauts operating under sustained physiological stress. Her dual background — the breadth of internal medicine practice and the precision of endocrine specialisation, combined with formal space medicine training — makes her the clinical authority for IHRI's work on HPA-axis stress signalling and allostatic load measurement across orbital and analogue environments.
As CMO, provides clinical governance for all health-related programmes and leads the endocrinological dimension of the Vector A research programme.
MSc Space Studies — KU Leuven, Belgium
Dual board: Internal Medicine · Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism
Cortisol dynamics and metabolic change in astronauts under sustained stress
Advisory Team & Extended Global Faculty
Beyond the four co-founders, IHRI has built an advisory team and extended global faculty — bringing international depth across health research, paramedicine, clinical governance, space medicine, and applied systems research. The team spans Australasia, North America, Europe, and Africa.
The full team, their roles, credentials, and research interests are on our collective page — including the IHRI Advisory Board.
Meet the Full Team & Advisory BoardThe Institution They Built
Licensed by MFHEA in 2025 following a three-year process. Two accredited programmes. Four research nodes. One governing conviction.
Doctor of Health Science (DHS)
Practitioner-centred professional doctorate for strategic health leaders. Research conducted on the candidate's own organisational challenges — supervised one-to-one. Fully online, asynchronous. Designed for working professionals.
Master of Philosophy (MPhil)
The MPhil is an exit award within the DHS programme — not a qualification that candidates apply for directly. It is awarded to candidates who complete the doctoral programme and whose work meets the rigorous standard of Level 7 but falls short of the doctoral threshold. It recognises substantial research achievement rather than failure, ensuring that candidates who have committed significant professional and academic effort to the programme have their work formally recognised at Masters level.
Candidates cannot apply for the MPhil as a standalone qualification. It is awarded at the point of doctoral assessment where work meets Level 7 standards.
New Avenues of Enquiry
Research that tackles pressing global health problems — grounded in practice, not abstraction.
Practitioner-Scholars
A new generation equipped with theories and tools for the complex challenges of twenty-first-century healthcare.
Innovation & Adoption
Bridging the gap between what research produces and what health systems actually need.
Is the DHS for You?
The Doctor of Health Science is not a programme for everyone. It is designed for a specific kind of person at a specific point in their career.
You have spent fifteen to twenty years — or more — leading health systems. You make decisions that affect thousands of patients, hundreds of staff, and the long-term trajectory of the organisations you run. You have navigated crises, redesigned services that were failing, built care models for populations that nobody else was willing to serve, and produced knowledge that your organisation uses every day.
And your qualifications do not reflect any of it.
That gap has probably stopped mattering in day-to-day leadership — you are operating at a level where what you know is more important than what your CV says. But at some point the gap becomes tangible. A role that requires a doctoral credential. A research project that needs institutional credibility. A legacy question: what happens to everything I have learned if I don't formalise it?
The DHS is the answer to that question. Not a programme that asks you to study other people's problems in your spare time. One that builds a rigorous doctoral framework around the knowledge you already have, the organisation you already lead, and the problem you already know needs solving.
Who Our Candidates Are
EMS chiefs and directors who have spent two decades designing and leading pre-hospital systems and want to formalise and advance what they know at doctoral level.
Hospital COOs, quality directors, and clinical leaders who have rebuilt systems, led accreditation processes, and navigated complex governance challenges — without a research framework to validate what they have learned.
Public health directors and policy leaders whose pandemic-era decision-making drew on expertise that no qualification yet reflects — and who want to produce the evidence base that the field needs.
Rural and remote health leaders, community paramedicine directors, and integrated care designers who are solving problems that mainstream health research has not yet caught up with.
From the Current Cohort
One of IHRI's founding doctoral candidates is a Regional Director of Emergency Medical Services — an experienced health system leader whose doctoral research is producing a validated framework for resilient EMS system architecture in geographically dispersed populations.
This is knowledge that exists nowhere in the published literature, produced by the person with the most direct operational expertise to generate it. That is what the DHS is for.
Supervised by Practitioners, Not Only Academics
Every IHRI doctoral candidate works one-to-one with a supervisor whose background includes direct operational or clinical experience in health systems — not only academic study of them. The supervisory relationship is built around the candidate's specific professional context and research challenge. IHRI does not place senior practitioners in generic academic cohorts and assign them reading lists. It builds a doctoral framework around the knowledge each candidate already has, supported by supervisors who have operated in the environments that knowledge came from.
You do not need to step away from your career. You do not need to start over academically. You need a supervisor who understands your world, a framework worthy of your experience, and an institution serious enough to stand behind the credential.
If you are reading this and recognising yourself — that is the point.
Begin the Conversation
IHRI was designed for health leaders who have built expertise that their current qualifications do not yet reflect. If that describes you, we would welcome a conversation about whether our Doctor of Health Science is the right next step.
Co-Founders
Accredited
Malta · EHEA
DHS Total
Regulatory Disclosure
The International Health Research Institute (IHRI) Ltd is a Higher Education Institution licensed by the Malta Further & Higher Education Authority (MFHEA Licence: 2025-004). IHRI holds MFHEA accreditation for two Homegrown Qualifications: the Doctor of Health Science (DHS) at MQF/EQF Level 8 and the Master of Philosophy (MPhil) at MQF/EQF Level 7. Both programmes are available from 2025 and verified on the MFHEA public register. IHRI is the sole awarding body for both qualifications. IHRI operates under the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESG 2015) within the European Higher Education Area. Our accredited academic programmes (Pillar I) are functionally distinct from our independent applied research nodes (Pillar II).
Important Notice: IHRI academic programmes do not lead to a warranted profession or related regulated occupation. Candidates are advised to consult their local regulatory bodies regarding professional licensure in their specific jurisdictions.
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