Richard Dobson is Deputy Director of the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre and Theme Lead for Informatics, as well as co-director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Driven Health. He holds professorships at King’s College London and University College London, and heads the Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics at King’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience.
With over 20 years of experience developing data and AI solutions for the NHS, his major contributions include co-founding the CogStack platform, which supports decision-making and research by processing large volumes of clinical text, and developing RADAR-Base, an award-winning open-source platform that collects patient-generated data from wearables and smartphones, now used globally across physical and mental health conditions.
More recently, he has led the development of Foresight, a CogStack innovation that uses large language models (LLMs) to predict medical events from millions of patient records, partnering with regulators and NHS England to ensure safe, fair, and scalable use of AI in healthcare. This work has been extended to development of a national foundation model of electronic health records (Foresight-SDE) for 51m people through a partnership with NHS England, Databricks, Amazon Web Services, Health Data Research UK (HDRUK) and the British Heart Foundation.
He has built strong collaborations with industry, charities, and academia, and sits on national advisory groups shaping UK strategy and funding, such as the NIHR Mental Health Mission (MHM). His work has received widespread recognition, with CogStack featured in major reports and keynote addresses, and numerous awards highlighting the societal impact of his research, which continues to improve healthcare delivery, patient experiences, and outcomes on a broad scale.
