People Biography

Professor Raghib Ali is an internationally recognized leader in clinical epidemiology and population health. He is also a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge, research professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, a consultant in Acute Medicine at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust and an honorary consultant with the Office for Health Disparities and Improvement.

He is the CEO, chief investigator and chief medical officer of Our Future Health, the largest health research programme of its kind in the world with over 2.5 million participants, focused on discovering new ways to prevent, detect, and treat disease. He was appointed as chief medical officer in 2022 and CEO in 2023 and has built Our Future Health into the most diverse cohort in UK history with greater geographic, socio-economic and ethnic diversity than any previous study. 

He graduated from Cambridge University and has been awarded postgraduate degrees in epidemiology and public health from the Universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford and is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

Professor Raghib’s research is distinguished by methodological rigour, scale, and policy relevance. His research is helping to transform the understanding of the aetiology and prevention of non-communicable diseases. His main research interests are in health inequalities and specifically in improving understanding of the causes of non-communicable diseases in neglected populations in the UK, India and the Middle East, and how to prevent them. 

He has published over 150 papers with over 100,000 citations and an H-index of 55 and been awarded grants of over £400 million for Our Future Health and the UAE Healthy Future Study. He has also been involved in population health research since 2004 nationally and globally, working firstly on UK Biobank, then leading studies of cancer incidence by ethnic group in England and India from 2005 to 2013. 

Professor Raghib Ali established the UAE Healthy Future Study in 2014 which focuses on understanding the causes of common chronic diseases including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He was awarded the OBE for services to the NHS and the Covid 19-response in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2022. In April 2023, he was elected to the Honorary Fellowship of the UK Faculty of Public Health, the highest accolade the Faculty can bestow and is awarded to those who have given exceptional service to the science, literature or practice of public health.