Professor Robert Stewart

Biography

Rob Stewart is Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Clinical Informatics, and leads Clinical and Population Informatics in the Maudsley NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. He has been Academic Lead for the Maudsley’s Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) platform since its development in 2007-8. CRIS is an internationally unique data resource comprising de-identified full electronic mental health records from the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (over 400,000 patients) with extensive enhancement through multiple data linkages and natural language processing (‘text-mining’) algorithms. CRIS has been used extensively for research to improve the understanding of mental health conditions and mental healthcare services, and has supported over 150 peer-reviewed publications.  

Rob Stewart joined the Institute of Psychiatry as a junior researcher in 1996 and has worked on the epidemiology of dementia and other late-life mental disorders and on a range of International Mental Health initiatives, as well as his more recent activity in Clinical Informatics. He is a practising Consultant in Liaison Old Age Psychiatry and an NIHR Senior Investigator.  

Research Interests

• Clinical informatics and mental healthcare data science 
• Mental health in older adults 
• Dementia epidemiology 
• Physical-mental health interface 

Rob Stewart’s work on CRIS has focused particularly on the physical health inequalities faced by people with mental disorders, as well as longstanding interests in the physical health impact of dementia and its implications for safer prescribing. He directs several programmes of work to improve the quantity and quality of data from routine electronic health records through natural language processing.  

Research Groups

Maudsley NIHR Biomedical Research Centre

Expertise and Public Engagement

Rob Stewart leads KCL’s MRC Mental Health Data Pathfinder programme which seeks to deliver informatics capacity at a national level in collaboration with a number of other sites. He co-leads KCL’s public health input on the London Health Data Research UK site.  

Rob Stewart has served as Academic Secretary for the Royal College of Psychiatrists Faculty of Old Age Psychiatry, and as Chair of the European Psychiatric Association Section of Epidemiology and Social Psychiatry.