Shazia Iqbal | Member Regional Office for Europe Knowledge Community, World Health Organization and Senior Lecturer
University of Buckingham

Dr Shazia Iqbal is a Senior Lecturer and Program Lead at the University of Buckingham and a Member of the WHO Regional Office for Europe Knowledge Community, with extensive experience in medical education leadership, curriculum design, and digital health innovation. She has previously served as Director of a Medical Education Centre and as an academic clinician in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, combining frontline clinical insight with educational strategy. Her work focuses on enabling meaningful academic–industry collaboration to support safe, ethical, and effective digital transformation in healthcare education. She has a particular interest in how virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and blended IBL reality can be aligned with the evolving digital laboratory and health-technology market to enhance clinical skills training, surgical education, and simulation-based learning. In the current AI era, Dr Iqbal advocates for major curricular reforms that embed artificial intelligence, immersive technologies, and data literacy within undergraduate and postgraduate medical programmes. Her scholarship explores how generative AI, immersive simulation, and blended inquiry-based learning can strengthen scientific reasoning, learner engagement, and workforce readiness. She regularly delivers international faculty development on ethical AI, immersive learning design, and future-focused medical curricula, and actively supports cross-sector partnerships that connect educators, clinicians, technologists, and industry to co-create the next generation of digitally enabled healthcare education.