Professor Aiden Doherty
Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Nuffield Department of Population Health
Professor Doherty's team of 20 researchers use wearables in very large population health studies to better understand the causes and consequences of disease. For example, the team has played a key role in the UK Biobank and China Kadoorie Biobank activity monitoring projects, with wearable data collected in more than 150,000 participants. Professor Doherty advises the World Health Organisation on strategies to use wearables in disease surveillance, with reports published in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
About
Professor Aiden Doherty is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Oxford. He leads a team of more than 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, Professor Doherty is Vice-President at Reuben College, Oxford’s 39th and newest graduate interdisciplinary college.
He has played 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 their 2024 paper in Nature’s Digital Medicine Journal already receiving >160 citations.
Professor Doherty 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, he advises the World Health Organisation on strategies to use wearables in disease surveillance.
Expertise
- Physical activity and health
- Wearables and health
- Sleep and health
Selected publications
- 11 million days of longitudinal wearable data reveal novel future health insights (preprint 2026)
- Joint associations of device-measured step count and sleep duration with incident major adverse cardiovascular events: prospective analysis of the UK Biobank (2026)
- Self-supervised learning for human activity recognition using 700,000 person-days of wearable data (2024)
- Association of wearable device-measured vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity with mortality (2022)
Media experience
Professor Aiden Doherty has media experience working with national and international outlets such as The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal. He has given numerous press interviews including with CNN, The Times, The New York Times and many others. Professor Doherty also has experience being interviewed live for broadcast media such as an interview on South African national news channel eNCA on physical activity and cardiovascular disease and a radio interview on weekly Rehabilitative Medicine Show on SiriusXM Satellite Radio, USA. Other experience includes providing expert input for various BBC (TV and website) pieces on wearable technologies in health and giving presentations to the public such as at the local Oxford Open Doors event for the Nuffield Department of Population Health.