Roger Highfield and Peter Coveney Chaired by Irene Tracey

Scientists Professor Peter Coveney and Professor Roger Highfield explain how scientists around the world are building virtual copies of individual human beings that will help them to predict our risk of disease and identify the therapies that will improve our wellbeing and extend our lives.

Coveney and Highfield say there are many challenges left in the creation of so-called digital twins and explain what it will take to build one. They look at the complexity of the human body and the latest scientific advances, including multiscale modelling and new forms of computing that will make a ‘virtual you’ possible. And they look at the ethical questions involved in achieving so-called ‘predictive medicine’.

Coveney is director of the Centre for Computational Science at University College London, professor at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, and professor adjunct at the Yale School of Medicine. Highfield is science director at the Science Museum Group, a member of the Medical Research Council, and visiting professor at University College London and the Dunn School, University of Oxford.

Discussions will be chaired by the new vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford Professor Irene Tracey, a professor of anaesthetic neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Biosciences. Tracey is a former warden of Merton College and a founding member and former director of the world-leading Oxford Centre for Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, now the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging.

This is the inaugural Vice-chancellor’s Interview at which speakers are invited for interview by the Vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford.