Biography

Professor Patty Kostkova is a Professor in Digital Health and the Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Public Health in Emergencies (dPHE). She has received an MSc and PhD in computer science. Prior to joining UCL, Patty was appointed ISI Foundation Fellow, Italy, and lead the thriving department City ehealth Research Centre (CeRC), City University London. She was a consultant at WHO, ECDC, Sky, Telefonica. Her research investigates One Health mobile and IoT surveillance in Brazil and Madeira, maternal health in Nepal and antibiotic stewardship (AMS) to combat antibiotic resistance (AMR) in Nigeria and the NHS. During the COVID-19 emergency, she has lead an award winning project My Lockdown Journal and longitudinal analysis of our lifestyle changes ‘Zoom or Not to Zoom’, while advising WHO on digital strategies and digital surveillance frameworks.

In 2019 and 2020, two years in a row, Patty won the industry ‘Innovator of the Year’ Award, in 2017 was shortlisted for the Woman of the Year and in 2018 for the Team Leader of the Year by Computing Women in IT Excellent Awards. Her team (UCL dPHE) won the Team of the Year 2020 Award by Computing Rising Stars Awards for the COVID-19 innovations.
Regular invited and keynote speaker at prestigious institutions and international conferences, Patty published over 230 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and edited a number of journals. Since 2014, she is the Editor in chief of the Frontiers in Digital Public Health. Patty is also the General and Scientific Chair of the International Public Health Conference series since 2009 (www.acm-digitalhealth.org). Her research was extensively covered by international media including the Medi1TV, BBC, AFP, the Vancouver Sun, the Malaysian Insider and Madeira TV. In 2020, she received the prestigious Coronaprofile by Business Science. In 2023, she was appointed a member of WHO Technical Advisory Group on the development of the Strategy and Action Plan on health emergency preparedness, response, and resilience (Preparedness 2.0) in the WHO European Region.

She is a regular lecturer lecturer at ITI/UMA and was appointed to ITI for her expertise in mobile and IoT sensor surveillance of vector-borne diseases, serious games and decision support gamified apps for health, in particular, antibiotics prescribing.