Aziz Sheikh

Chair of Primary Care Research and Development

Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics

Tel: +44 (0)131 651 4151
Email: aziz.sheikh@ed.ac.uk
Web: Aziz's profile on Edinburgh Research Explorer
Professor Sheikh on Twitter

Usher Institute

Street: Old Medical School,
Teviot Place
City: Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9AG

Biography

Background

Professor Sheikh is Director of the Usher Institute. His interests include studying asthma and health inequalities.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Currently Aziz holds a number of visiting chairs, namely: University of Birmingham (UK), Queen Mary’s University of London (UK) and Maastricht University (Netherlands) and was recently appointed as Visiting Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

He is an editorial board member of Medical Care and Health Informatics Journal; Associate Editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the International Journal of Medical Informatics; Guidelines and Guidance section adviser of PLOS Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of npj: Primary Care Respiratory Medicine.

Aziz was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Medicine and Health Care by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2014.

Research

Research summary

Aziz's research interests include asthma, health inequalities and using health information technology (HIT) to enhance the quality, safety and efficiency of health care. He has recently returned to the UK after completing a Harkness Fellowship in Health Policy and Practice based at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, USA.

He is a co-investigator in the Farr Institute and is Director of the 14-university Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research.

During his research career to date, he has had over 800 peer-reviewed publications with over 21,000 citations (Google Scholar) to his work. Together with colleagues, he as held research grants in excess of $50m.

Past research interests

In the past he has advised the Scottish, UK, US and Saudi Governments on HIT and patient safety. He was also an adviser to the NHS Connecting for Health's Evaluation Programme. From 2009 -2010 he served as a member of the Information Technology for Patient Safety Expert Working Group of the World Health Organisation's World Alliance for Patient Safety and is now co-chairman of the Patient Safety in Primary Care Expert Working Group and an Adviser to the Office for the Eastern Mediterranean Region for the WHO. Other advisory work includes time spent as a member of the UK Government’s Research Excellence Framework panel for Medicine.