Richard Dobson is Professor of Medical Informatics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), Theme Lead for Informatics at the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, and Professor of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the Institute of Health Informatics, University College London (UCL).

He also co-chairs the Centre for Translational Informatics (CTI). The CTI is a partnership between university and healthcare sectors to facilitate the realisation of innovative healthcare applications.

His research is motivated towards enabling a “panor-omic” view of patients through the integration of genomics data with data derived from patient records, the exposome, social graphs, remote monitoring and imaging to develop strategies for P4 medicine, namely, medicine that is precise, predictive, preventative and participatory.

The research has required the extensive use of computational approaches as such machine learning, the creation of software tools, development of a hospital development environments and large private cloud infrastructure with safe haven status to enable integration of patient datasets.

The work has led to a rich portfolio of academic collaborations, some key ones include TwinsUK, HipSci, the Alzheimer’s Research UK Drug Discovery initiative (ARUK-O3DI), GENAROAD, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, and The Center for Behavioural Intervention Technologies, Northwestern, Chicago (CBITS).

His research has strong links with the technology and pharma industry, charities, and academia (notably Farr Institute for Health Informatics). Dobson sits on grant review panels & strategy groups, including the DoH 10-year strategy for Population & Health Services Research in mental health working group, Genomics England (EHR GeCIP co-lead), Canadian Foundation for Innovation, mental health charity MQ, NIHR and London GMCs.

He is UCL's and King's College London’s informatics lead for several industrial and academic collaborations, including the EU IMI2 European Medical Information Framework (EMIF), IMI2 €22m Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse (RADAR-cns.org), H2020 Kconnect (kconnect.eu), IMI2 BigData4BetterHearts, Intel-Turing Institute collaboration, Lilly, UCB, Janssen, Biogen, GE, Intel, IBM, SoftwareAG, Michael J Fox Foundation, Vibrent (a major subcontractor to the US Precision Medicine Initiative) and FitBit.

Research interests

• Bioinformatics
• Biomarkers
• Modeling
• Next generation sequencing
• Machine Learning
• Data Integration
• Networks

Teaching

• Bioinformatics, Interpretation and Data Quality in Genome Analysis
• Research Project
• Fundamental Neuroscience

Expertise and public engagement

• Population & Health Services Research working group, informing the Strategy Steering Group. Responsible for providing a narrative for inclusion in the final DoH 10-year strategy document. Department of Health (2016)
• Joint leadership for the GeL EHR Genomics England Clinical Interpretation Partnership (GeCIP) & Clinical Data and Life Course working group, Genomics England (2016-present)
• Member - aims to harness 1% of NHS IT funding for an open platform in healthcare to meet the needs of 21st Century Healthcare, 1% Open Digital Platform Challenge Fund Push (2016-present)
• BioResource Sequencing and Informatics Committee Member, NIHR (2012-present)
• Member of the University College London Hospital (UCLH) Research Systems Strategy Group (2016-present)
• Member of the King’s Health Partner (KHP) Informatics Strategy group (2016-present)