Expert profiles

The researchers, industry experts, and business development professionals who help deliver data-driven activities and partnerships

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Atul Anand

Clinical Lead for the Health and Social Care DDI DataLoch Programme and Senior Clinical Research Fellow
I am an academic consultant geriatrician working at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. My passion for working with older people has been driven by the exclusion of the oldest and often most vulnerable in society from traditional medical research. The use of routinely collected or so-called ‘big data’ has started to change this, by allowing smarter, inclusive research with quicker assessment of the effect of changing treatments on patient outcomes.
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Rafael de Oliveira Silva

DDI Chancellor's Fellow
Rafael de Oliveira Silva is an applied mathematician working with mathematical models of agriculture, food security and biodiversity conservation. His research includes modelling climate change adaption and the social impacts of sustainable intensification pathways.
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Joshua Ryan-Saha

Director, Traveltech for Scotland, & Tourism, Festivals & Infrastructure lead - Edinburgh Futures Institute
To be a tourist is to choose the unknown over the familiar. The tourist steps outside their workaday life and embraces something totally different. This process of de-familiarising might seem frivolous, ‘extra’, an added bonus, the icing on the cake. On the contrary; it has the power to shape every aspect of a person’s everyday life.
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Gemma Cassells

Lead Strategist, Data-Driven Innovation
I’m passionate about exploring how the region can work collaboratively to solve challenges. The breadth of services provided by the public sector means there is no shortage of opportunities for data-driven innovation.
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Helen Dundas

Agritech Innovation and Enterprise Lead, Roslin Innovation Centre
With a growing number of people suffering from malnutrition and chronic hunger, the United Nations FAO is predicting that by 2050 the world population is expected to rise by another 2.5 billion people. This is likely to create some major challenges for the planet.
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Catalina Vallejos

DDI Chancellor's Fellow
Chancellor’s Fellow Catalina Vallejos, based at the University of Edinburgh's MRC Human Genetics Unit, operates at what she describes as “the interface between Bayes and biomedicine.” In other words, her work brings the precise, analytical capability of statistics to bear on the messy and unpredictable realm of large scale data – specifically, in fast-growing biomedical research areas.
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Encarni Medina-Lopez

DDI Chancellor's Fellow
After studying in Spain and working in Oxford, where she carried out research on coastal structures, Encarni Medina-Lopez did her PhD jointly at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Granada. A specialist in marine energy, Dr Medina-Lopez was initially drawn to a Chancellor’s Fellowship in the School of Engineering by the way the Fellowship is structured.
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Francesco Giorgio-Serchi

DDI Chancellor's Fellow
In 2011, Chancellor’s Fellow Francesco Giorgio-Serchi won a Marie-Curie Fellowship to conduct research into bio-inspired aquatic propulsion, which, as the name suggests, involves learning lessons from natural organisms and applying them to the development of engineering projects.
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Nayha Sethi

DDI Chancellor's Fellow
A 2016 doctoral graduate of the University, Dr Sethi has published on topics ranging from the regulatory challenges of doing research during global health emergencies, to exploring rule, principle and best practice approaches to decision-making.
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Yunjie Yang

DDI Chancellor's Fellow
Dr Yang’s work at the Intelligent Sensing Laboratory brings a wide range of tomographic methods together with machine learning. The aim is to create better visualisations of complex industrial and biomedical processes, and then to use these images to improve system control and fault detection.
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Kristina Tamane

Space Sector Lead
I’ve had the pleasure of working with world-leading remote sensing experts to predict land slides from space, address deforestation globally and develop tools to help in the climate change battle we face as humanity.
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Dr Beatrice Alex

DDI Chancellor's Fellow, Edinburgh Futures Institute
Dr Beatrice Alex leads the Edinburgh Language Technology Group, a research and development group with longstanding expertise in text mining and natural language engineering. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University’s School of Informatics, and a Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute.
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