Data Analytics Research and Technology in Healthcare
(DARTH group)
Alumni of the group
Post-doctoral researchers
Holly Tibble
Post-doctoral researcher, 2021-2023
Holly studied Mathematics at the University of Cardiff and has an MPhil in Epidemiology from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining DARTH she was a research fellow in Statistics at the University of Melbourne, and an Assistant Statistician at Roche. She completed her PhD with the DARTH group, supervised by Thanasis and Prof. Aziz Sheikh, as a member of AUKCAR (full 3-year scholarship).
In her post-doc Holly further extended findings from her PhD and also was seconded on the EAVE II project to work on COVID.
- Upon completion: Holly started her independent Chancellor's Fellowship post with the Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh.
Dorien Kimenai
Post-doctoral researcher, 2020-2022
Dorien is a clinical epidemiologist who had previously studied at the Leiden University (BSc), the University of Amsterdam (MSc), and the Maastricht University (PhD). She has considerable experience in healthcare settings, having worked as a clinical perfusionist for almost 6 years. Before joining the group she was a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh for 6 months.
Dorien worked with Prof. Nick Mills, Anoop Shah, and Thanasis. Dorien's post-doctoral work was funded through HDRUK.
- Upon completion: Dorien stayed at the University of Edinburgh as a post-doctoral researcher
PhD graduates
Andres Gomez-Rodellar
PhD in Medical Informatics, 2024
Andres obtained his degree in Electrical Engineer at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 2016 (MSc. level). He spent the last year of his undergraduate programme as an Erasmus exchange student at the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. During this period, he worked as an intern for Philips Research at the High Tech Campus. Before joining DARTH he had been with the research group of Signal and Image Processing at the Biomedical Technology Center (RGSIP-CTB) of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (2016-2019). His main work involved the recording of speech and facial myoelectric surface signals in neuromotor degenerative disease for patients with cognitive diseases and language disorders.
His PhD focused on developing new methods to look into both mechanistic and statistical signal processing methods exploring the relationship of speech and Parkinson's disease. Andres was co-supervised by Prof. Saturnino Luz at Edinburgh, Prof. Victor Nieto Lluis (Universidad Polytecnica de Madrid) and Prof. Per Svenningson (Karolinska Institute). He was funded through the Medical Research Council (MRC) DTP Precision Medicine programme (full 3.5-year scholarship).
- Thesis: Unveiling the Impact of Neuromotor Disorders on Speech: a Structured Approach Combining Biomechanical Fundamentals and Statistical Machine Learning
- Awards during PhD: First prize, Edinburgh Research Interest Group in Parkinson's (outreach event)
Dimitrios Doudesis
PhD in Medical Informatics, 2022
Dimitrios studied Statistics at the Athens University of Economics and Business, and completed an MSc in Medical Statistics at the University of Southampton (2018). He had previously worked as a Data Analyst at Predicta S.A.
His PhD focused on myocardial infarction using statistical machine learning algorithms capitalizing on routinely collected data in cardiovascular clinical practice. He was affiliated with the Centre for Cardiovascular Science and co-supervised by Prof. Nick Mills. He was funded through the Medical Research Council (MRC) DTP Precision Medicine programme (full 3.5-year scholarship)
- Thesis: Improving diagnosis in acute cardiac care using statistical machine learning
- Upon PhD completion: Dimitrios stayed at the University of Edinburgh as a post-doctoral researcher
Elsie Horne
PhD in Medical Informatics, 2021
Elsie studied Mathematics at the University of Bristol and completed an MSc in Medical Statistics at the University of Leicester. Prior to joining DARTH she was a Research Assistant at the Bristol Biomedical Research Centre, University of Bristol on a pre-doctoral fellowship.
Her PhD research focused on developing novel approaches towards clustering people with asthma. Elsie was affiliated with the AUKCAR and was co-supervised by Prof. Aziz Sheikh. She was funded through AUKCAR (full 3-year scholarship).
- Thesis: A data-driven approach to identifying subtypes of adult asthma from primary care electronic health records
- Upon PhD completion: Elsie joined the University of Bristol as a post-doctoral researcher
Holly Tibble
PhD in Medical Informatics, 2021
Holly studied Mathematics at the University of Cardiff and has an MPhil in Epidemiology from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining DARTH she was a research fellow in Statistics at the University of Melbourne, and an Assistant Statistician at Roche.
Her PhD research focused on developing novel approaches to mine large electronic health record databases and develop predictive models of asthma attacks. Holly was affiliated with the AUKCAR and was co-supervised by Prof. Aziz Sheikh. She was funded through AUKCAR (full 3-year scholarship).
- Thesis: Data-driven approaches for predicting asthma attacks in adults in primary care
- Upon PhD completion: Holly stayed at the DARTH group for her post-doctoral work
Minhong Wang
PhD in Medical Informatics, 2021
Minhong studied Biomedical Engineering at Northeastern University in China (2015) and completed an MSc in Bioinformatics at the University of Edinburgh (2016). She also studied Computer Science at Inha University (South Korea) and finished her thesis at the University of Dundee as an exchange student.
Her PhD research focused on developing a predictive agent-based model for pattern formation in pluripotent stem cells. Minhong was co-supervised by Dave Robertson, Guillaume Blin and Saturnino Luz.
- Thesis: New insights into probabilistic pattern formation of embryonic stem cells using agent-based modelling
- Upon PhD completion: Minhong joined UCL as a post-doctoral researcher
MSc graduates
Edward T. Chiyaka
MSc student in Data Science, Technology & Innovation, 2023
Edward studied Mathematics for his undergraduate and MSc degrees and completed a PhD in Public Health at Kent State University, USA (2019). His thesis focused on identifying factors associated with asthma severity and predicting the progression of the disease.
His MSc thesis was co-supervised by Thanasis and Holly.
- Thesis: A multi-state Markov model for the progression of asthma disease
- Placement/most recent known position: Assistant Professor of Healthcare Administration and Research in the Wingate University School of Pharmacy.
Jean-Baptiste Gay
MSc in Computational Applied Mathematics, 2021
Jean-Baptiste pursued a BSc in Advanced Engineering and Science and an MSc in Mechanics at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, before completing the MSc in Computational Applied Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. He had worked as a tutor delivering courses in physics at a bachelor level and as a product owner for a fintech start-up prior to his MSc.
- Thesis: Sparse PCA in generalized low rank models: explainable representation of mixed-type data
- Placement/most recent known position: Jean-Baptiste is exploring data science opportunities
Stefanos Karageorgiou
MSc in Statistics with Data Science, 2020
Stefanos studied Statistics and Insurance at the University of Piraeus before completing an MSc in Statistics with Data Science at the University of Edinburgh. In parallel with his undergraduate studies, he volunteered at a refugee camp in Greece and worked at Alpha Bank Greece as a junior risk manager for two years. Prior to his postgraduate studies, he served at the Hellenic Navy for one year. He is interested in machine learning for medical applications.
- Thesis: Automatic coronary artery calcium classification using machine learning (one of the top MSc theses in the School for 2020)
- Placement/most recent known position: Stefanos is working as a data scientist in Analytical View (Athens, Greece)
Katherine Edgley
MSc in Computational Applied Mathematics, 2019
Katherine studied Applied Mathematics at Brown University (USA) and completed an MSc in Computational Applied Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. She had previously worked as a counselor at a summer youth camp and had taught English as a foreign language in Germany.
- Thesis: Sleep and activity analysis of stroke patients using wrist-worn sensor data (one of the top MSc theses in the School for 2019; Best student award)
- Placement/most recent known position: Katherine is working on her PhD with the DARTH group and the EXPPECT research team.
Mohamed Donia
MSc in Computational Applied Mathematics, 2019
Mohamed studied Mechanical Engineering at the American University in Cairo, had 2 years of research experience in oilfield products simulation and another 2 years in cardiovascular statistical image analysis and blood dynamics simulation before completing his MSc. He is interested in Statistical Learning, Decision Sciences and their applications to natural language processing, population health, economic policy, and social sciences.
- Thesis: Thorough empirical comparison of statistical learners in binary and multi-class classification settings
- Placement/most recent known position: Mohamed is working as a data manager in a start-up in Egypt
Kate Christopoulou
MSc in Computational Applied Mathematics, 2019
Katerina completed her BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Patras graduating as the second best student of her cohort, before studying for her MSc in Computational Applied Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. She had worked as a personal tutor delivering courses in mathematics, physics, and programming.
- Thesis: An investigation into ensemble statistical learning with applications in XG Boosting
- Placement/most recent known position: Katerina is working at a cloud-based analytics company in Edinburgh
Dimitrios Doudesis
MSc in Medical Statistics, 2018
Dimitrios studied Statistics at the Athens University of Economics and Business, and completed an MSc in Medical Statistics at the University of Southampton (2018). He has also completed an online micro-Masters program in Data Science offered by the University of California San Diego. He had previously worked as a Data Analyst at Predicta S.A.
- Thesis: Feature selection algorithms for the development of parsimonious statistical learning models
- Placement/most recent known position: Dimitrios is pursuing a PhD at the DARTH group
Sean Nolan
MSc in Computational Applied Mathematics, 2018
Sean studied Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at Trinity College Dublin (First class), before competing his MSc in Computational Applied Mathematics (Distinction). He had previously worked as a trader intern in Dublin and as a research internet in computational physics at CRANN.
- Thesis: Dimensionality reduction in machine learning (one of the top MSc theses in the School for 2018)
- Placement/most recent known position: Sean has moved into proprietary trading and market making and is currently working for a quant fund in London. He uses machine learning techniques to predict market directions and execute optimal trades.
Undergraduates
Douglas Wyllie
Visiting undergraduate research student, summer 2019
Douglas is studying Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Glasgow. He worked at DARTH for 12 weeks over the summer period just before starting his 4th year (of a 5 year MPhys degree). His work uses wearable devices on the wrist that measure movement to determine the sleeping patterns of post stroke patients.
- Worked on mining smartwatch data to characterize stroke patients
- Placement/most recent known position: Douglas is pursuing a PhD at UCL.