McAuley Oration 2026
Date: Tuesday 24 November 2026
Time: 4pm
Location: Archway 2 Lecture Theatre, University of Otago, 290 Leith Walk, Dunedin North
Cost: Free public lecture
Livestream: echo360.net.au/section/2fe2f08d-cecf-44d4-b6c5-f4dd3806c205/public
AI for global health: opportunities, risks, and future developments
Ambient AI scribes record and summarise patient consultations; radiology AI systems can interpret X-ray images in seconds; and patients are turning to ChatGPT in their droves with their healthcare questions.
How good are these systems? Do they preserve patient privacy? Can they support low-income countries to provide higher quality healthcare services? What is next for healthcare AI?
In this talk, Dr Chris Paton will share the latest research on AI in healthcare and how it could be used to safely support healthcare provision in resource constrained settings.
Speaker: Chris Paton
Chris Paton is an Associate Professor at the Liggins Institute and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Auckland.
He trained in medicine in the UK and worked in the NHS and the NZ healthcare system before entering academia. He received his DPhil in Clinical Medicine from the University of Oxford on the topic of improving the usability of digital health technologies and completed an Executive MBA from the University of Auckland in 2011.
He’s a member of the Health Systems Collaborative at the University of Oxford, where he worked for >10 years as a clinical researcher working on health informatics research projects in Africa and Southeast Asia. He’s the founding Editor in Chief of BMJ Digital Health & AI and a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS).