Professor Josip Car is a physician, researcher and health systems leader whose work harnesses digital innovation and AI to make healthcare more humane, equitable and effective. At King’s College London, he serves as Director of King’s Population Health Institute, Head of the School of Life Course & Population Sciences, and Chair in Population and Digital Health Sciences. He is also Director of Population Health for King’s Health Partners, and holds visiting professorships at the National University of Singapore and Imperial College London.

Before joining King’s, Professor Car held a range of leadership roles in the UK and Singapore, including Founding Director of the WHO Centre for Digital Health and Health Education, Director of Public Health, Primary and Integrated Care at Imperial College Healthcare, Director of the NIHR Primary Care Research Network for London (NW), and Director of the Global Digital Health Unit at Imperial College. Clinically trained, he worked as a GP for over 25 years and is now an honorary NHS consultant. His frontline experience continues to shape his work in population health and his vision for person-centred, technology‑enabled healthcare.

His research is at the intersection of population health, digital health and AI, focusing on translating evidence into real-world impact through scalable personalised interventions. Drawing on combined academic, clinical and executive leadership experience, Professor Car has worked across diverse health systems and with organisations, including the World Health Organization, international agencies and industry.

Professor Car’s research advances three interrelated areas with the shared goal of improving health outcomes at scale. First, he contributes to the digital and AI‑enabled transformation of healthcare by developing novel models of human-AI collaboration in clinical care, personalised medicine and population health. Second, he examines how health system and policy innovation can deliver better population health, including through strengthened primary care, population health management models and data‑driven approaches to prevention and chronic disease management. Third, digital health education for professionals and patients, ensuring that clinicians and communities can use digital and AI tools confidently, safely and to maximum benefit.

Reducing health inequities is a common thread through his work. He leads EMBRACE (Enhanced Maternal and Baby Results with AI supported Care and Empowerment), a research programme that aims to improve maternal, child and lifelong health through personalised, human-AI interventions. EMBRACE is establishing one of the world’s largest prospective digital cohorts of pregnant women, their partners and their babies, with a planned enrolment of 60,000 participants across diverse global regions.

Professor Car is deeply engaged in training the next generation of medical, population and digital health leaders, having supervised many PhD students and mentored numerous early‑career investigators. He has led the development of innovative curricula in digital and AI‑enabled health. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh) and of the Faculty of Public Health. Professor Car has authored over 400 peer‑reviewed publications, policy reports and book chapters, and his work with co‑authors has been cited over 100,000 times. He has led major programmes funded by a range of agencies and industry, securing, as lead or co‑lead, more than £100 million in research funding. This work has contributed to national and international guidelines and digital health policies in areas such as telehealth and digital health competencies.

Professor Car welcomes expressions of interest from prospective PhD students in population health, digital health and AI‑enabled health.

 

Executive Assistant: Helen Rumble (EA-HeadSLCPS@kcl.ac.uk)