William Whiteley is a Professor of Neurology and Epidemiology at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh and a consultant neurologist in NHS Lothian, working with patients with TIA, stroke and dementia. 

He is an associate director of HDRUK with a responsibility for brain health and leads the BHF Data Science Centre Stroke Data Science Catalyst. He is the clinical lead for the Chief Scientist's Office Scottish Stroke Research Network. He sits on the MRC Neurosciences and Mental Health Board, the MRC Population Health Sciences Group, and contributes to advisory groups in the Scottish Parliament.

He has founded and run the Edinburgh Stroke Winter School and clinical PhD research training programs in stroke (funded by the Stroke Association) and dementia (funded by the Alzheimer's Society and University of Edinburgh). He has been supported by personal fellowships from the UK MRC (Clinician Scientist fellowship 2010-2015), the Chief Scientist’s Office (2006-2009, 2018-2025), and his work by the Alzheimer's Society, the BHF, Health Data Research UK, NIHR,  the Chief Scientist's Office, the Stroke Association and Chest, Heart and Stroke Scotland.

His work seeks to elucidate the mechanisms for prevention of disability due to stroke and dementia through the design, delivery and analysis of epidemiological studies and clinical trials. Of particular interest are: the contribution of vascular risk factors to dementia; the very long term follow-up of randomized trials; clinical diagnosis; and the better use of large electronic health record datasets for more efficient clinical trials and cohort studies, with the use of natural language, image processing and other models.

He founded the Edinburgh Clinical Natural Language Processing Group with Dr Honghang Wu and Dr Bea Alex, a multidisciplinary team at the University of Edinburgh who apply natural language processing to clinical text.

Stroke medicine

General neurology

Clinical epidemiology