About me
I am a medically qualified
with a special interest in applications of
in the context of
I have taken a rather odd route getting here...I started as a budding classical musician, and even won Young Musician of the Year *cough* Cyprus *cough* at age 18.
However, when the time came to choose, I declined a scholarship at the Royal College of Music, and decided to study Medicine at the University of Bristol instead, where I also did a short stint as a Neuroscientist, in the form of an intercalated Bachelor's degree. Upon graduation, I formally taught Anatomy to medical students for the university, and then worked as a junior doctor in the NHS for two years.
Wanting to focus on medical research, and having understood that AI/ML would be the future of medicine, I decided to do a conversion MSc in Advanced Computer Science - Machine Learning and Data Mining, also at the University of Bristol. This was arguably the best year of my life, where I discovered my love for Computer Science and AI (not to mention Caramel Macchiatos!), and got to unleash my dormant inner nerd.
After some more work in the NHS as a physician, I decided to follow my inner geek and applied and got a place to study for a DPhil in Biomedical Engineering, via the 'CDT in Healthcare Innovation' programme at the University of Oxford. My Thesis work proved that current validation methods used in medical imaging yield unreliable results and provided alternatives, and also fuzzy methods to incorporate a layer of clinical explainability on the results.
During my time in Oxford, I also co-founded Sentimoto Ltd, a start-up company dealing with wearable tech for older adults.
After my PhD, I was hired as a postdoc at the University of Essex for two separate research projects. The first involved work on the NEVERMIND project, an EU project dealing with Biomedical Signal analysis from smartphones and wearables for the management of secondary depression in people with life-changing primary medical events. The second involved work with Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) in the context of the BARI project, a UK-US collaboration investigating optimal co-operation in hybrid teams of Human and AI agents.
I am currently a Research Fellow in Health Informatics at the Institute of Public Health and Wellbeing, at the University of Essex. As part of the role I am also acting as a probationary Lecturer for the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering.
I got married to my beautiful wife Constantina in 2019 (luckily, just before the COVID-19 pandemic). My favourite sport is squash. Both my wife and I are avid board game geeks and love going on cycling trips. Someday we hope to visit Japan. :)
My academic research focuses on clinical and public health applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In particular, I’m interested in: data analysis and information fusion from biological signals (e.g. Brain Computer Interfaces, wearables, hospital-derived, etc) and digitised health data; medical image analysis, explainability, and appropriate validation; AI or tech-oriented public health interventions, and the use and benefits of free and open-source software in medicine.