Network Team

Prof Weizi (Vicky) Li is a Professor of Informatics and Digital Health, Deputy Director in Informatics Research Centre, Henley Business School, University of Reading. She is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on using informatics, data science, machine learning, and digital information systems to solve real-world healthcare challenges. She is the academic lead of a large collaborative project of Improving the Quality of Healthcare through an Integrated Clinical Pathway Management Approach and Cloud based Digital Data Integration Platform, which was awarded ESRC O2RB Excellence in Impact Award in 2018 for her research impact on healthcare quality improvement. She is the academic lead of machine learning based decision support system for outpatient management which has successfully been implemented in Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and has received Research Engagement and Impact award in 2020. She has been PI on projects funded by ESRC, EPSRC, The Health Foundation, NHS and companies, working on data-driven decision support systems that use real-world data (under privacy preserving framework) from multiple sources including Electronic Patient Record in acute, community hospital and primary care settings, remote health monitoring and patient reported outcomes to develop novel technologies (including AI based methods) to support clinical and operational decision makings in patient pathway.

Dr Robert Barker is an Associate Professor in Chemistry in the School of Physical Sciences, School Director of Public Engagement, project lead for the ‘Future Human’ Signature Research, University of Kent (UoK). He is a Royal Society Industrial Fellow and the PI of the trans-disciplinary EPSRC project Optimising Me Manufacturing Systems [EP/R022534/1], exploring continuous blood processing for healthcare and developing a healthcare micro-factory that provides on-the-body manufacturing of therapeutics, continuously and in response to the body’s needs. His work focuses on the whole blood processing and the development of a manufacturing system for T-cell immunotherapies which present a cure for some of the most aggressive forms of cancer (acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and chronic lymphoblastic leukaemia). His research is at the interface of industry and the NHS to meet their needs for continuous blood monitoring and to help the shift away from the current one-size-fits-all approach to deliver patient-specific therapies.

Dr Mark Elliott Mark is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Digital Healthcare, WMG, University of Warwick (UoW). Mark’s core research focuses on human movement and physiology analytics. His research uses signal processing and data science approaches to monitor, measure and model human movement and physiology to infer health status. He is the PI of the WMG Motion Capture Laboratory. His work further extends into the broader area of using wearable and on-the- body sensing devices to make objective measures of human behaviour and behaviour change. Much of Dr Elliott’s research is highly applied and involves collaborating with commercial and NHS partners. He has received funding from EPSRC, Innovate UK and SBRI Healthcare, as well as direct industrial funding. He is currently Data Analytics Theme Lead for the EPSRC funded OATech+ Network and on the steering committee for the EPSRC funded VSimulators facilities at Bath and Exeter.

Prof Jeremy Frey Professor of Physical Chemistry, Head of Computational Systems Chemistry, University of Southampton (UoS). He is PI of AI for Scientific Discovery Network+, and co_I on the Internet of Food Things Digital Economy Network+ and has had considerable involvement in the UK e-Science and Digital Economy programmes for many years (e.g., PI of the Digital Economy IT as a Utility Network+. He is a strong proponent of interdisciplinary research and the use of digital technology and ideas to enhance methods of scientific research & development. His own research involves activities across the physical land life sciences, from the application of novel mathematical analysis (e.g., Topological Data Analysis), laser spectroscopy and imagining techniques to chemical and biological problems, with the development of sensors and imagining systems such as the novel soft x-ray microscope. In parallel he works on the integration of these techniques with full provenance environment into laboratory systems using semantic web technologies.

Dr Serhiy Korposh is an Associate Professor in Electronics, Nanoscale Bioelectronics and Biophotonics at University of Nottingham. His current research focuses on the development of fibre optic sensors and instrumentation for biomedical application from discovery at the interface with physics and chemistry through to application addressing major healthcare challenges. He has published over 100 (h-index 21) peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, book contributions, holds 11 patents (4 licensed to UK and Japanese companies) and given invited presentations at international meetings in the field of optical fibre chemical sensors. He has managed as a PI and Co-I a total funding portfolio of £3.5 million in the area of biomedical point of care sensors. He was a Director of the EPSRC funded Network Cyclops (EP/N026985/1, Closed Loop Control Systems for Optimising Treatment, http://www.healthcaretechnologies.ac.uk/cyclops/); with the aim to facilitate the formation of a community of academics, clinicians and industrialists, across multiple disciplines (photonic sensing, advanced materials, treatment, and mathematical modelling), including international collaborators to address grand challenges in automation of treatment in healthcare.

Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza is a Senior Enterprise Fellow at the University of Southampton, and a Pathfinder Lead on Process Recording for the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI) Initiative. She completed her MEng in Computer Science at the University of Southampton and then worked for BAE Systems Applied Intelligence for a year before returning to do an iPhD in Web Science (in Computer Science and Chemistry), which focused on Semantic Tagging of Scientific Documents and Electronic Lab Notebooks. She was awarded her PhD in April 2018. Samantha works in the interdisciplinary research area of applying computer science techniques to the scientific domain, specifically through the use of semantic web technologies and artificial intelligence. Her research includes looking at electronic lab notebooks and smart laboratories, to improve the digitization and knowledge management of the scientific record using semantic web technologies; and using IoT devices in the laboratory. She has also worked on a number of interdisciplinary Semantic Web projects in different domains, including agriculture, chemistry and the social sciences.