DrClaire Baker

Dr Claire Baker is an independent Schmidt AI for Science Research Fellow at Imperial College London’s Dyson School of Design Engineering. She is passionate about co-designing equitable, accessible healthcare technologies that save lives globally. Her work develops data-driven, human-centred cyber-physical systems that integrate smartphone and vehicle sensor data with AI, computational digital twin environments and trauma biomechanics to predict time-critical injuries in road traffic collisions and translating these to improve the emergency medical response. She collaborates internationally and is working closely with NHS Ambulance Service partners, paramedics and regulators to integrate automatic triage and dispatch systems into emergency medicine and prepare for real-world deployment of sensor-driven injury prediction tools. She has a broader interest in sensing for health, working with air ambulance service research leads on time-critical patient monitoring and outcomes.

Dr Baker’s contributions to road safety have been recognised with the 2025 Prince Michael International Road Safety Award for the HIPER consumer helmet rating programme team and the Biomedical Engineering Society's 2025 ABME Best Research Paper Award for the underpinning research study which she was first author for, demonstrating both scientific and societal impact.

Her research has informed International Standards Organisation standards for injury prediction using vehicle sensors and advanced automatic collision notification, and has contributed to micromobility policy in the UK and Sweden. She is an active expert on the Parliamentary Advisory Committee for Transport Safety vehicle design working party striving to better protect vulnerable road users and a member of Euro NCAP’s brain injury working group translating research into safety assessments. She is an elected member of the Open Virtual Testing Organisation (OVTO).

Dr Baker served as the road trauma lead (one of two engineering leads among tens of clinicians) for TBI-REPORTER (the UK-TBI REpository and data PORTal Enabling discoveRy), a £10M national MRC/NIHR/MoD/ARUK funded initiative creating trauma biomechanics data standards and bringing together UK traumatic brain injury data and samples to make them more accessible to researchers. She collaborates with the IMPACT centre for post-collision research and translation, sits on the UK Road Injury Priority Setting Partnership steering committee, and contributes to Utstein guidelines for road injury and data-driven methods to reduce preventable pre-hospital deaths and inequality in emergency response outcomes.

Dr Claire Baker completed her multidisciplinary PhD in 2023 on the AutoTriage project within Imperial’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Neurotechnology, jointly based in the Departments of Design Engineering and Medicine and partnered with the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL). She previously gained a first class integrated master’s degree in Physics (Astrophysics) from the University of Southampton in 2017, completing her final year research at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.