Management team

The management team will be responsible for the overall running of the Centre, overseeing all aspects of the programme delivery and maintaining relationships with the University, the participating institutes, our external partners and UKRI.

The structure of the team consists of a Director, a Deputy Director, and an Executive Board, chosen for their extensive experience in training and their interdisciplinary profile. Collectively they provide expertise that covers each strand of research training that students will experience.

	Diego Oyarzún (CDT Director, School of Informatics & School of Biological Sciences) is Reader in Computational Biology. He leads a team focussed on biomolecular systems for future therapies and the industrial biotechnology sector. Applications of their technologies include engineering biology and gene circuit design using techniques from machine learning, dynamical systems and control theory. Diego is Programme Director of the MRC Cross-Disciplinary Fellowship Programme at the Institute for Genetics and Cancer, and co-founder of the Edinburgh Science for Sustainability Hub. He has had roles with influential multi-stakeholder bodies (World Economic Forum, G20, OECD, Alan Turing Institute) and is currently a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.
	Meriem El Karoui (Deputy Director and EDI champion, Biological Sciences) is a Professor of Bacterial Systems Biology and the Director of SynthSys, the Centre for Synthetic and Systems biology at UoE. She is currently a Wellcome Investigator and uses mathematical modelling to understand the emergence of Anti-Microbial Resistance. She was a visiting professor at Harvard medical School and is currently an associate faculty member of Ecole Polytechnique, the premier Engineering School in France. She chairs the Equality and Diversity committee of the School of Biological Sciences and has successfully led the 2016 School Athena Swann Silver Award submission.
	Ian Simpson (School of Informatics) is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics. Originally trained in Biochemistry & Genetics he has spent over 20 years studying brain development and function at the molecular level. He has developed novel methodologies and tools to analyse developmental expression data using graphical, dynamic and evolutionary models. His main research interests lie at the boundary between Informatics and Biomedicine and focus on jointly modelling molecular and clinical data in diseases with developmental origins such as Autism Spectrum Disorder. He was elected a member of the RSE Young Academy of Scotland in 2014 and is an active STEM Ambassador.
	Michael Gutmann (Informatics) is a Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning. He and has extensive international experience in developing methods for data analysis in biomedical applications. He served as an area chair for the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics and coordinates the professional development activities for postdoctoral research associates at the School of Informatics.
	Luciana D'Adderio is Chancellor’s Fellow in Data Science/Data Driven Innovation at the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute. Her work currently centers on Healthcare and Medical AI based technologies (e.g. expert and decision support systems for prediction or diagnosis). Luciana has worked over the years in close collaborations with a range of leading industrial companies, including most recently with GE Life Sciences. She welcomes prospective PhD candidates who have an interest in studying and understanding AI technologies in the context of real world practice, practitioners, and practices.
	Riccardo Marioni is a Professor of Molecular Epidemiology of Ageing and Group Leader in the Centre for Genomic and Experimental Medicine (CGEM, IGC). His group are interested in the integration of multi-omics data (genetics, epigenetics, and proteomics) and electronic health records to improve risk prediction and our understanding of the biology that underlies cognitive ageing and dementia. Their work is at the intersection of biostatistics, data science, epidemiology, and neuroscience.
	Ava Khamseh is Lecturer in Biomedical Artificial Intelligence, joint between the School of Informatics and Institute of Genetics and Cancer. Before taking up her current position, she was a Cross-Disciplinary Fellow (XDF) at IGMM. Her research involves designing experiments and developing causal mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for applications to cancer biology and large scale population biology data.
	Kathrin Cresswell (Usher Institute) is a health psychologist and experienced social scientist who has worked in the field of health informatics for over a decade. She has consulted for WHO and Harvard Medical School. She is currently holding a prestigious Fellowship from the Scottish Government and a Chancellor’s Fellowship from UoE. She is also Director of Innovation at UoE’s Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics.
	Miguel O. Bernabeu (Usher Institute) is a Professor of Computational Medicine and Deputy Director of the Bayes Centre is specialised in microvascular biomechanics and mechanobiology.
	Robin Williams (Social and Political Science) is Chair of Social Research on Technology. He led Edinburgh’s successful bid under the ESRC Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (1987-95) and was Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Innovation in Genomics (Innogen 2002-12). He was on the founding programme committee of the Alan Turing Institute.
	Isabelle Hanlon is CDT Coordinator responsible for all aspects of administration and operational development of the CDT programme.
	Ken Scott is CDT Business Development Manager responsible for supporting and growing the relationships with external industrial partners.

This article was published on 12 Mar, 2024