Prof. David Stuckler · Formerly Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge

Publish your first paper, without losing three years to it.

I have published over 400 peer-reviewed papers. I now work directly with practising clinicians on their first one. Most of the time people lose is not spent writing; it is spent on a topic that was never going to work.

Apply to work with me

Two minutes. Every application gets a reply.

Start here · about 12 minutes

How the method works, before you apply.

Choosing a topic that can actually be answered. Running a search that gives you an argument instead of nine hundred PDFs. Writing in the order that does not stall. Watch this first; the application will make more sense afterwards.

Apply to work with me

Professor David Stuckler — Prof. David Stuckler

Who you would be working with

Nobody teaches clinicians the mechanics.

I was a full professor at Oxford in my early thirties and a tenure-track professor at Harvard. My PhD is from Cambridge. I have published over 400 peer-reviewed papers, in journals including Nature, The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, PLoS Medicine and PNAS.

What interests me now is a structural problem: why so many capable clinicians never publish. Universities assume you will absorb the mechanics by osmosis. Supervisors are stretched thin. Careful people lose years on topics that were doomed from the first week. FastTrack is what I wish someone had taught me at the beginning.

400+ peer-reviewed publications
Full professor, Oxford, early thirties
Tenure-track, Harvard · PhD, Cambridge
Co-author, The Body Economic
700+ researchers trained
Across 50+ countries

See my full publication record →

Why it takes people so long

The delay is almost never the writing.

The topic

Most first papers are lost here, months before anyone writes a sentence. The question is unanswerable with the data available, or it has been answered four times already.

The search

An unfocused literature search returns nine hundred papers and no argument. Done properly it returns forty and tells you exactly where your contribution sits.

The order

People write the introduction first. It is the last thing you can write honestly, and starting there is why drafts stall at 60 percent for a year.

Fix those three and the timeline collapses, not because anyone worked faster, but because the wasted year never happens. That is the whole of what I teach.

The guarantee

We stay until your paper is published.

To be exact: I cannot guarantee a particular journal will accept your paper, or that it will happen by a particular date. Nobody can, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you something. What I guarantee is that we do not stop at the end of the three months. We keep going, at no extra cost, until it is published.

That holds as long as you hold up your end:

Five to ten hours a week on your research
Attend the group feedback calls
Complete the worksheets and revisions

No clause about specific journals. No deadline you can fail.

A physician's account

Vineetha wrote her first paper around a full-time clinical job.

Hospice and palliative medicine physician, six years in practice. Published in a peer-reviewed journal in her specialty. She had a baby partway through.

Evidence

Selected recent papers by researchers I have worked with.

Named authors. Real journals. Most link straight to the paper.

Paper
Vineetha JoseJ Pain & Symptom Management, 2026Read it →
Paper
Rikard RosenbackeJMIR AI, 2024Read it →
Paper
Maria BakolaEuropean J of Public Health, 2022Read it →
Paper
Cornelia SantosoSoc Psychiatry & Psych Epidemiology, 2024Read it →
Paper
Heather IngoldFrontiers in Public Health, 2024Read it →
Paper
Nehal NourBMC Medical Education, 2023Read it →
Paper
Vineet MishraBMC Digital Health, 2024
Paper
Marianna KyrgiafiniBiology, 2022
Paper
Gabor ScheiringBritish J of Political Science, 2024Read it →
Paper
Cynthia AtambaSage Open, 2024
Paper
Joanne NgIssues in Educational Research, 2023
Paper
Tal BermanJ of Small Business Management, 2024
Paper
Marcello CosaJ of Social Entrepreneurship, 2023
Paper
Feli ZulhendriDesalination & Water Treatment, 2025
Paper
Feli ZulhendriCase Studies in Chem & Env Engineering, 2026

What you get

Three months, then as long as it takes.

Direct mentorshipUnlimited messaging with FastTrack mentors, all PhDs and professors. Typical reply within 24 hours, Monday to Friday.
A roadmap sessionAn hour, one to one, at the start. We settle your topic and build a step-by-step plan for the paper.
Two feedback calls a weekLive hour-long sessions. Bring your draft, get it marked up, hear what others are stuck on.
Courses and worksheetsThe process broken into small assignments. You submit them and get them back annotated.

Asked and answered

The honest version.

How long does it actually take?

It depends on you, your data and your reviewers. Clinicians who put in five to ten hours a week move fastest, and some have a first draft inside three months. Peer review then takes as long as it takes, and revisions are normal rather than a sign something went wrong. I do not put a date on acceptance, because that date is not mine to set.

I have no research background. Is that a problem?

No, and many of the people listed above started there. What you need is a question worth asking, access to data or a literature you can work with, and consistent weekly hours. You do not need a methods background. That is the part I teach.

Will a FastTrack mentor be an author on my paper?

Sometimes, and only where the contribution meets authorship criteria. On some projects a mentor contributes substantively to design, analysis or drafting and is named accordingly. On others they do not and are not. We agree this openly at the roadmap session rather than at the end.

Do you help with statistics?

Yes. Study design, data collection and analysis, with support for R, Stata and SPSS.

What if I stall?

That is what the guarantee is for. If you are still putting in the hours, I am still working with you, past the three months, at no extra cost.

Apply

Tell me what is actually blocking your paper.

The next step is a thirty-minute strategy call. We use it to find the single biggest thing slowing your research down, and to build a plan for your next publication. I work with clinicians who can commit five to ten hours a week over three months.

Apply to work with me