Isabel Straw, BMBS, PhD

Dr. Isabel Straw is an Assistant Professor in Healthcare Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity at the Faculty of Population Health Sciences at University College London, where she leads the CRASH Team (Cybersecurity Resiliency & AI Safety in Healthcare, Research Team). She also serves as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Healthcare Cybersecurity at the University of California, San Diego, where she models patient-level impacts of healthcare cyberattacks. With a background as an Emergency Doctor, a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, and industry experience as a cybersecurity analyst, her research focuses on the intersection of emerging technologies and patient safety.

Her work involves collaborations with national and global institutions on cybersecurity for critical infrastructure and the risks of frontier AI models, working with organizations such as the United Nations, the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence, the British Standards Institution, the UK Medical Royal Colleges, and governmental agencies. In 2019 and 2021, she contributed to UNESCO’s development of the first global Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and continues to serve as an expert author on AI and Gender for international UN guidance.

Dr. Straw’s research has been featured in national newspapers and major news outlets, and she has presented at leading hacker and cybersecurity conferences, including DEFCON Homecoming, DEFCON 2024, and May Contain Hackers (MCH).