Despite considerable success in fighting infectious and other preventable diseases, challenges related to non-communicable diseases such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, and mental ill health endure. Tackling these challenges requires innovative, interdisciplinary research that uses new technologies, data, and methods to produce clear impactful scientific outcomes. At the Health Innovation Ecosystem, our mission is to become the hub for world-leading research, student engagement and academic enterprise activity related to health and wellbeing. Our goals are to define and measure health, discover and innovate change, and enable efficient hospital and primary care. We will:
- Pursue and enrich interdisciplinary innovation in national and international health research to influence clinical guidelines and policies and maximise positive impact on the personal, community, and global health;
- Integrate social and health sciences with new areas of advanced analytics, data science, machine learning, imaging technology and artificial intelligence and a humanitarian focus that transcends traditional boundaries within health research and practice;
- Collaborate with local communities, patients, health professionals, and science and industry to find real, workable solutions to global health challenges and challenges facing the healthcare sector, with an emphasis on chronic conditions;
- Push the boundaries of current research and practice by developing alternate, disruptive and evolving perspectives on health; and
- Engage our students in innovative, impactful health research to produce the next generation of innovative health scientists.
The Ecosystem is interdisciplinary and sits across multiple academic structures of the University. Its founders – Professor Jimmy Bell, Professor Damien Ridge, Dr Marie Polley, Professor David Peters, and Professor Thierry Chaussalet – are situated in the School of Life Sciences, School of Social Sciences and School of Computer Science and Engineering.