Professor Carl Thompson

Chair: Applied Health and Care Research; Dame Kathleen Raven Chair in Clinical Research, University of Leeds

Carl Thompson is Professor of Applied Health and Social Care Research at the University of Leeds a core partner of NIHR SSCR@Leeds and NICHE-Leeds, an academic-care sector research partnership based on the Dutch "Living Lab" model.

Carl has led pioneering work at the intersection of health technology, implementation science, and adult social care. He is Principal Investigator of SENSITISE, a national programme exploring how older people and care professionals prioritise the features of technology-enabled care (TEC), and he has advised care providers, local authorities, and national bodies on the implementation of TEC to improve safety, quality, and independence in domiciliary and residential settings.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Carl led the first study of wearable technology enabled contact-tracing in care homes (The CONTACT trial). 

Carl’s work spans empirical research, policy influence, and implementation support — from evaluating remote monitoring for falls prevention in care homes, to shaping data-sharing infrastructures that support ethical, actionable insights from real-world care data. His focus is not only on what technologies can do, but on how and why they are (or aren’t) adopted in the human, complex systems of social care.

He is a frequent advisor to the NIHR, UKRI, and international research councils, and continues to advocate for evidence-based, user-centred innovation in homecare and community support for older people.