Dr Aiden Doherty of BHF CPNP, was rewarded at the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) 2015 – COFUND AWARDS for his work analysing big data for health purposes.
Aiden was honoured for his excellent research during the Awards Ceremony, which was held in Cercle Cité in Luxembourg City .The prize was jointly remitted by Claudie Haigneré, former French minister, astronaut and researcher, Martine Reicherts, Director General of DG Education and Culture of the European Commission and Marc Schiltz, Secretary General of the Luxembourg National Research Fund.
Following his MSCA COFUND fellowship at Oxford University, Aiden has established himself as a research leader in the analysis of sensor data to understand human behaviour. His research interest is in the development of computational methods to extract meaningful health information from complex and noisy sensor data in very large health studies. Being at the intersection of medical sciences and computing, his research interests focus on extracting lifestyle health behaviours, and the social and environmental context in which they occur, from accelerometers and wearable cameras. This builds on experience at Microsoft Research, Dublin City University (both in computing departments) and the University of Oxford (population health and biomedical engineering). Dr Doherty has over 50 peer-reviewed publications and is on the UK Biobank expert working group on processing accelerometer data.
Aiden’s interdisciplinary research is a perfect example of a successful combination of academic and non-academic collaboration, which is promoted and encouraged in the MSCA schemes. His research might help more clearly and precisely understand lifestyle health behaviours and how they are associated with health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease.
The two other winners were Dr Julien Meyer for Interpreting whistled languages through cognitive science and Dr David Hoey for developing innovative treatments for osteoporosis.