Aiden Doherty

Aiden is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Oxford. He has the privilige of leading a team of >20 researchers and believes that it is critical to support junior researchers to develop their own independent careers at the intersection of computing and medicine to tackle the most important scientific questions. To date, he has mentored 15 early career researchers to obtain £8.8M in fellowships from Wellcome, Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation, US National Institute of Health, and the UK National Institute of Health Research. To support training opportunities for the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists, Aiden is Vice-President at Reuben College, Oxford’s 39th and newest graduate interdisciplinary college.

He has been fortunate to play a key role in the UK and China Kadoorie Biobank activity monitoring projects, with accelerometer data collected in ≈150,000 participants. These resources are now used by thousands of researchers worldwide to interrogate a range of scientific questions. His team’s development of self-supervised learning has helped transform physical activity and sleep measurement with our 2024 paper in Nature’s Digital Medicine Journal already receiving >160 citations. Aiden chairs the UK Biobank’s international expert working group on remote monitoring technologies and sits on the scientific advisory boards of the EU-IMI IDEA-FAST wearable sensing project (46 industrial/academic partners across 15 countries) and the €7M EU iPROLEPSIS project on psoriatic arthritis inflammation. In addition, Aiden advises the World Health Organisation on strategies to use wearables in disease surveillance, with reports published in 2024 and 2025.

Awards

2022-27 Wellcome Senior Research Fellowship

2015 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions COFUND Award (only 3 selected from ~9000 EU fellows between ’07-’13)

2015-17 British Heart Foundation Centre for Research Excellence intermediate transition fellowship

2010-13 Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship (E.U. FP7 and Irish Health Research Board)

2005-08 Irish Research Council science PhD scholarship