Aziz Sheikh is Professor of Primary Care Research & Development and Director of the Usher Institute at The University of Edinburgh. He is Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Allergy at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, NHS Lothian, Director of the 16-university Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research, Director of the NIHR Global Respiratory Health Unit (RESPIRE), Co-Director of the NHS Digital Academy, and Director of BREATHE – The Health Data Research Hub for Respiratory Health.
Aziz has substantive academic and health policy interests in leveraging the potential of health information technology and data science to transform the delivery of health care and improve population health, which have led him to work with numerous governments, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank. He serves on the Steering Group and as Chair of the Evaluation Group of the WHO’s 3rd Global Safety Challenge on Medication Safety and is an adviser to the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office.
He is an editorial board member of PLOS Medicine, Medical Care, Health Informatics Journal and BMC Medicine, and is Editor-in-Chief of Nature Partnership Journal: Primary Care Respiratory Medicine. He was Guest Editor of PLOS Medicine’s theme issue on Machine Learning in Healthcare and Biomedicine (2018) and BMC Medicine’s theme issue on Big Data in Healthcare (2019), and serves on The Lancet’s Commission on the Future of the NHS. He chaired the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) Forum on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.
Aziz has held research grants in excess of £150m, has over 1,000 peer-reviewed publications, and has a H-index of >100. He is a ‘Highly Cited Researcher’. He has been honoured with fellowships from 8 learned societies and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2014.
