Prof. Dick Heller is a medical graduate from London University and has worked in the UK, the US and Australia. He retired in 2006 from the post of Professor of Public Health in the University of Manchester, UK, having previously been Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Educational highlights have been the involvement with INCLEN, an organization originally funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which involved capacity building in a number of medical schools across the developing world. As part of that, he developed a distance learning masters course from the University of Newcastle and subsequently built a fully online masters course in Public Health in Manchester. He is the originator of the idea for the Peoples-uni, to help with capacity building in developing countries, using open access resources on the Internet. His research interests have been in the causes and prevention of heart disease, and in developing measures to describe the population impact of disease risks and the benefits of interventions.