TIA Centre: News

We are thrilled to announce that one of the TIA Centre’s PhD students, Neda Zemanitajeddin, has successfully defended her PhD viva – congratulations Neda!

Neda’s thesis, titled “Cellular Social Network Analysis in Computational Pathology”, introduces Cell Social Network Analysis (CSNA), an interpretable framework that models cellular interactions in histopathology using principles from social network analysis. CSNA achieves state-of-the-art performance in colorectal cancer grading and biomarker prediction, both as a standalone method and when fused with deep learning, while remaining computationally efficient.

By integrating CSNA with domain-robust and multi-cancer models, Neda’s work uncovers conserved, biologically meaningful tumour microenvironment signatures linked to microsatellite instability (MSI) across cancers. These findings highlight the potential of network-based approaches to advance precision oncology and improve interpretability in computational pathology.

We were honoured to welcome Dr Mitko Veta (Eindhoven University of Technology) as the external examiner for the viva.

We also extend our gratitude to the University of Warwick for supporting Neda’s PhD journey.