Speakers

Ian Simpson is Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and a leading figure in biomedical and healthcare AI. He directs the UKRI Centres for Doctoral Training in Biomedical AI and in AI for Biomedical Innovation.   

Trained at Oxford, where he gained a B.A. and M.A. in Biochemistry and a D.Phil. in Genetics, his work bridges computational science and medicine. He develops novel computational, statistical, and machine learning methods to understand human disease—with a particular focus on neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders and rare genetic diseases. Recent work also spans Autism Spectrum Disorders, Parkinson's Disease, and several cancers.   

The Biomedical Informatics Group he leads specialises in multimodal data integration—learning jointly from heterogeneous data types by bringing together patient and molecular networks. This includes combining clinical notes and healthcare metadata with genomics and other high-throughput biomolecular data, drawing extensively on graph neural networks and biomedical natural language processing.