Lennard graduated from the University of Cambridge (2005) and studied clinical medicine at the University of Oxford (2008). He has been successful in securing numerous nationally competitive research fellowships and leadership roles prior to his recruitment to the University of Oxford as an Academic Clinical Lecturer.

These roles include:-

• a Medical Research Council Clinical Training Research Fellowship (2013), supervised by Professor Ian Tomlinson at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics;
• a Biomedical Research Centre Clinical Research Training Fellowship at the University of Oxford, with Prof David Kerr (2017);
• a Senior Clinical Research Fellowship at the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, University of Birmingham, working with Professor Gary Middleton (2018-2020).
• Co-deputy lead, lateral flow diagnostics, Department of Health (2020-2021)
• Programme lead for Multiple Cancer Early Diagnostics, as part of the NHS-Galleri study (2021-2022)

Lennard has led major programmes to safeguard, evaluate and protect cancer patients from coronavirus. He was awarded the ACP McElwain Prize for this initiatives. He also is delivering programmes to accelerate the development of multi-cancer early diagnosis blood tests through population-scale studies.

A global impact pandemic response programme

Lennard’s work as a CL at Oxford has on maximised the safety of cancer care during the pandemic through his leadership of the UK Coronavirus Cancer Programme.

It is one of the longest running and most successful pandemic response programmes for cancer patients, established in March 2020. The mission is to safeguard, evaluation and protect cancer patients during the COVID-19 pandemic through population-scale real world evaluations.  The project was set up in 100 hours and linked 86 cancer centres across the United Kingdom.

The project was the first to demonstrate that chemotherapy could be safely delivered during the coronavirus pandemic. It reversed the decline in chemotherapy treatment, identified those most at risk and led to long-lasting positive clinical benefit globally. It remains the most active COVID/cancer research programme, with 12 research outputs to date with over 1,000 citations. Lennard was awarded the national ACP McElwain Prize for his contributions to the pandemic response for cancer patients.

Innovative post coronavirus clinical studies

Lennard has unparallelled expertise in innovative post-coronavirus trial designs. He has a strong track record in successfully delivering population-scale, real-world evaluation studies using post-coronavirus acceleration strategies. These lever the potentials of population electronic health records and data science.

Lennard's work has included:

• The Falcon C-19 Moonshot - Hybrid studies are characterised by population-scale recruitment and real-time results acquisition and analysis, providing the highest quality evaluations in the most efficient manner. Lennard levered the advantages of this study type to generate the evidence for a new form of coronavirus diagnostics, the lateral flow test. This was achieved with the Falcon C-19 Moonshot study. As deputy co-lead at the UK Department of Health, the study accelerated lateral flow tests from an unproven research tool to a test widely available across the NHS, the UK and globally.
• The UKCCEP - Lennard is leading post-coronavirus clinical studies to provide real-world evaluations of coronavirus vaccination in cancer patients. This approach uses population-scale cohorts of 100,000 of individuals to give the highest quality analyses of vaccine effectiveness. 
• The NHS-Galleri study - More recently, as national innovation project lead at NHSE, Lennard has helped to deliver hybrid cancer studies as part of the NHS-Galleri study team. This study evaluates a new blood test that can diagnose 50 types of cancer. Utilising a hybrid design, the study is one of the fastest-recruiting studies globally.

These population-scale programmes of work using innovative post coronavirus clinical studies will provide the opportunity to increase early diagnoses for cancer and potentially bring about a transformational shift in cancer outcomes in the UK, whilst continuing to safeguard, evaluate and protect cancer patients.