Adam Shephard has just joined the department as a Research Fellow and is currently working in the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) Lab on the ANTICIPATE project funded by Cancer Research UK. He has recently submitted his thesis on the application of deep learning to paediatric MRI at Aston University, under the supervision of Prof. Amanda Wood and Dr. Jan Novak. His role in the ANTICIPATE project will be concerned with the development and application of deep learning techniques to digitized histology slides to aid in the more efficient grading of head and neck tumours, to ultimately provide more accurate patient prognoses.

Dr Criseida Zamora has joined the department to work together with Dr Yulia Timofeeva, Prof Kirill Volynski (UCL) and a number of other world-leading experimental laboratories on an MRC-funded project "Virtual presynaptic nerve terminal". This project aims to develop a unified computational modelling framework which will allow the neuroscience community to explore mechanisms of synaptic transmitter release that cannot be directly determined experimentally.

Criseida is a Bionic engineer working in the Systems Biology field. She received a PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering and Physics working on the analysis of biochemical noise in synthetic genetic circuits at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico. Her academic background and research experience have focused hitherto on building in silico models to study emergent properties of molecular systems to answer physiological questions. She has also worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan and the University of Bristol.

Dr Fayyaz Minhas of the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) lab at the Computer Science department is a co-PI on a £97K grant by Cancer Research UK’s Early Detection Committee to explore machine learning for discovery of pre-neoplastic signature in mesothelioma. He will be working closely with the PI Dr Jan Lukas Robertus, who is a Senior Consultant Cardiothoracic Pathologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Dr Minhas will lead on the machine learning and computational pathology side of the project.