Paul A. Watters PhD CITP is Head of Data Services at the Medical Research Council's National Survey of Health and Development, which is the oldest of the British birth cohort studies. He is also an honorary senior research fellow at University College London. Dr. Watters is the project manager for the MRC's Data Access Project, and is presently investigating methods for securing investigator access to public health data in large-scale distributed systems in a challenging ethical and legal environment. He has an active research interest in the use of orthogonal and non-orthogonal methods for feature extraction in pattern recognition, especially in biometric applications.