Role: General and scientific co-Chair
Affiliation: UCL dPHE, London, UK
Professor Patty Kostkova is a Professor in Digital Health and the Director of UCL Centre for Digital Public Health in Emergencies (dPHE). Prior to joining UCL, Patty was appointed ISI Foundation Fellow, Italy, and led the thriving department City eHealth Research Centre (CeRC), City University London. She was a consultant at WHO, ECDC, Sky, and 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 led an award-winning project My Lockdown Journal and a 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. In 2024, she won the Highly Commended Award in the category Emerging Technologies by Computing Women in Tech Excellence with her MEWAR project in Brazil. Her team (UCL dPHE) won the Team of the Year 2020 Award by Computing Rising Stars Awards for the COVID-19 innovations.
Regularly invited and keynote speaker at prestigious institutions and international conferences, Patty has published over 280 peer-reviewed papers, and book chapters and edited a number of journals. Since 2014, she has been the Editor-in-chief of the Frontiers in Digital Public Health. Patty is also the General and Scientific Chair of the International Digital Public Health Conference series since 2009 (www.dphconf.org). Her research was extensively covered by international media including 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, and 2024, she was appointed a Faculty/Professor member to the Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI) in Portugal for her research achievements in serious games, as well as invited to a parliamentary event hosted by MPs to advise on strategies for fighting mosquito-borne diseases in the House of Commons.