Prof. Richard Dobson

 

Richard Dobson is Professor of Medical Informatics and lead for Bioinformatics and mHealth for the Maudsley BRC and King’s College London, & at the Institute of Health Informatics, 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 “panoramic” 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.

His research has strong links with the technology and pharma industry, charities, and academia (HDR UK). Dobson sits on grant review panels & strategy groups for the MRC, 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 and KCL’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. His 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).

Dobson is bioinformatics and mobile health lead at the National Institute of Health Research Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust since 2009. He is also Actionable Analytics theme lead for London in the recently formed national institute for Health Data Research (HDR UK) and academic lead for the technology components of a number of European Commission’s Innovative Medicine Initiative’s (IMI) programmes (>€50m). This includes the RADAR-CNS (Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse in CNS disorders) programme, a €25M ($30.5M) grant which seeks to use mobile technologies (smartphones and wearables) to improve outcomes in epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and depression. This work has involved the development of a scaleable and extensible open-source platform (radar-base.og) for data acquisition, organization, storage, analysis and visualization of data collected from these devices both actively (eg questionnaires) and passively (eg sensors).

Since joining the Maudsley BRC in 2009, he has generated a critical mass of informatics infrastructure and expertise (0 to >30 posts). He has >200 peer reviewed publications (Google H-Index 38, Scopus 33), 19 PI Grants since 2009 (~£11,580,420) from a total of 40 grants (~£17,674,955). He leads or co-leads three BRC informatics themes at the Maudsley and UCL BRCs. Maudsley BRC Informatics is recognised as a lead informatics hub and has been awarded uplifts in both BRC renewals. Grants are from NIHR, EU, MRC, WT, industry partnerships and UK and international charities.