Dr Chris Hinds has become the first Robertson Fellow at the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute.
Chris's research explores the use of digital phenotyping methods to understand health and disease. He is currently leading a collaboration between the Oxford Big Data Institute, the Dementias Platform UK, Eli Lilly, and Roche, to design develop and validate digital biomarkers for dementia. A critical problem in developing preventative drugs for Dementia is how to identify large numbers of potential participants at the very earliest point in their disease progression. He is developing smartphone apps that he hopes will achieve this at least a decade before diagnosis.
“It’s really important that academia and industry collaborate and work toward standards for measurement in this domain,” he explains. “Long term, the fact that we’re open sourcing everything we do is going to be really important. However, right now the challenge is to make our remote phenotyping technology incredibly easy for participants to use, and totally straightforward for scientists to add into their studies”.
Chris is currently recruiting to several new positions: a Postdoctoral Software Development Lead, a Cognitive Scientist , and a DPhil supervisor for the research project looking at the role of citizen science cohorts in digital phenotyping, which will start in October 2017 and is currently open for applications.