speaker biographies

Asra Aslam

Dr Asra Aslam is Research Fellow in the Institute of Health Sciences within the Faculty of Medicine & Health, University of Leeds, UK. Before joining as Research Fellow, she worked as a “Machine Learning Researcher” at Industry (mindtrace), Manchester, UK for 2 years. Her research interests are Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Multimedia Event Processing, and Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT). She completed her Ph.D. in 2021 from the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University of Galway, Ireland. She also worked as a “Lecturer” in the Department of Computer Engineering, AMU, India for 1 year (2015-2016). She completed B.S./B.Tech. and M.S./M.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from AMU, in 2013, and 2015, respectively. She was also a recipient of Global Talent Endorsement (by UKRI), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Fellowship, IDB, and Sir Syed Fellowships. During her eight years of research, she published papers in various conferences (CVPR, ICMR, DEBS, IVCNZ) and journals (IEEE Access, IMAVIS Elsevier, MTAP Springer, Procedia Computer Science, LNCS). Till now, she also acts as a program committee member and a reviewer for various conferences/journals such as ICML, AISTATS, Imaging Science, NeurIPS, IEEE Access, LatinX AI, Multimedia Tools and Applications, Journal of Communication System etc.

Victoria Bartle

My background is in retail, hospitality and welfare to work management and training. I have lived experience of being disabled, accessing primary and secondary and social care for myself and as a carer for a friend. I have been involved in PPIE work since leaving employment in 2016 due to the impact of multiple long term health conditions. I started by joining the Voice Research Support Group providing feedback to researchers on their projects, in person and in writing. I am now an NIHR research champion, a co-applicant with ADMISSION, a PPI member for a number of individual studies including AI Multiply as well as being the PPI representative for the NIHR MLTC CNC. I work with my local ARC and Fuse as a public contributor chairing meetings and hosting the Fuse podcast. I am also a member of the North East and Yorkshire Research for Patient Benefit funding committee, the Editorial Board for the NIHR evidence alerts and the strategic planning group for the CRNCC. I love being involved in research and believe that including the patient perspective is essential in ensuring research can truly benefit the people that it is designed to help.

Simon Fraser

Simon is Associate Professor of Public Health at the University of Southampton. He has been interested in long-term conditions throughout his career, having been a GP for sixteen years and retraining as a Public Health specialist. His doctoral degree focused on the epidemiology of chronic kidney disease with a particular interest in health inequalities and health literacy. He has subsequently led several studies on multiple long-term conditions, kidney disease, medicines optimisation, health-related quality of life and treatment burden. His research aims to understand and address the determinants, burden, inequalities and adverse outcomes associated with long-term conditions.

Mahwish Mohammed

Mahwish is working as a Data Wrangler for the AI for Multiple Long-Term Conditions Research Support Facility and is a member of the Data for Research programme at The Alan Turing Institute, focusing on delivering research ready data. Mahwish started at the Turing in June 2022 and obtained her Bachelors in Mathematics and Masters in Machine Learning from Royal Holloway. She has a diverse background in software support, healthcare and data science.

Chris Orton

Chris is technical lead for the Inflammation and Immunity HDR UK Driver Programme, leads research and infrastructure development projects for SAIL Databank and the Secure eResearch Platform (SeRP) UK, and is currently managing the reproducible infrastructure theme for the AI for Multiple Long-Term Conditions: Research Support Facility. Chris has been with Population Data Science at Swansea University since 2012 and has project and programme management experience across multiple research disciplines and technologies, feeding into large-scale developments in population health across the UK and internationally. Chris continues to work with senior management in Swansea and across HDR UK on national strategy for infrastructure and research development, and with analysts worldwide supporting their research using SeRP technology.

Rachael Stickland

Dr Rachael Stickland is a member of the Data for Research programme at The Alan Turing Institute. This programme focuses on delivering research ready data. The provisioning of data is often the largest single hurdle for most analytical projects. The aim of the programme is to remove this burden and provide tools, standards and processes for integrating and provisioning high-quality data. Rachael started at the Turing in September 2022, employed as a Data Wrangler for the AI for Multiple Long-Term Conditions Research Support Facility. Rachael’s background training is as a research scientist, completing a PhD and postdoctoral research in the field of neuroimaging, specialising in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Lauren Walker

Dr Lauren Walker is Clinical Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics and Honorary Consultant in General Internal Medicine. Her research involves predicting risk and examining patient journeys to identify at what point the harm of medicines outweigh the potential for benefit. She is the Deputy Director at the NIHR Clinical Research Facility at Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust where she is a first-in-human Principal Investigator. Clinically, she contributes to outpatient clinics, inpatient reviews and multidisciplinary team meetings for adults with complex multimorbidity & polypharmacy. She works with Clinical Pharmacologists, Pharmacists, Geriatricians and GPs across the UK to design and develop an integrated service model and a unified, sustainable approach to improving polypharmacy, through multidisciplinary collaboration across primary and secondary care. Previously providing in-reach deprescribing services into primary care she now undertakes medicines optimisation through a multispecialty, multimorbidity virtual multidisciplinary team.

Kirstie Whitaker

Kirstie is a passionate advocate for making science "open for all" by promoting equity and inclusion for people from diverse backgrounds. She is the co-lead investigator of the AI for Multiple Long Term Conditions Research Support facility and Director of the Tools, Practices and Systems Research Programme at The Alan Turing Institute. Kirstie is the lead developer of The Turing Way, an openly developed educational resource that trains and enables researchers and citizen scientists across government, industry, academia and third sector organisations to apply open source practices to their work. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley (2007-12) and the University of Cambridge (2012-17) investigated structural and functional brain development for children and adolescents using magnetic resonance imaging. She is a Fulbright scholarship alumna, was a 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science, and served as an inaugural member of the Brain Imaging Data Structure Steering Committee (2019-21).

Lynne Wright

I am retired and live in East Devon. My husband. Adrian, died last year. I have two daughters and two granddaughters. I have been involved in PPIE for over ten years and had previous served two three-year terms as a Governor of my local NHS Foundation Trust Hospital. I have been involved with charities, universities and health related organisations taking part in research studies including being co-applicant and on Steering Committees. I am a member of the PenPEG at Exeter University, INVOLVE at Hull University and the MMTRC (Multi Morbidity) PiMM with UCL. I am also a member of UseMyData. I have a keen interest in Genome Research, AI and Palliative and End of Life Care. Adrian had Parkinson’s with Lewy Body Dementia together with other co-morbidities and I was his carer for many years. Caring for someone with MLTC can be difficult, particularly if they also have a dementia. It involves different consultants with lots of different medications and one medication can cause a reaction with another medication. It is also sometimes hard to be listened to as a Carer but we often know our loved ones needs better than anyone else.

Christopher Yau

Christopher Yau is Professor of Artificial Intelligence based at the Big Data Institute in Oxford working across the Nuffield Department of Women's and Reproductive Health and the Nuffield Department of Population Health. He holds a UKRI/EPSRC Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship and is PhD Programme Director at Health Data Research UK, leading the Health Data Research UK-Turing Wellcome PhD programme in Health Data Science. He is AI Lead for the NIHR OPTIMAL project which is led by the University of Birmingham.

Yajing Zhu

Yajing is a Principal Data Scientist and digital health concept leader at Roche, personalised healthcare Centre of Excellence. She is a statistician by training and has worked extensively on real-world data and real-world evidence related projects to assist early and late-stage drug development. Yajing is also a principal investigator for a couple of university-industry research collaborations for algorithm development and validation using big healthcare data. In the digital health space, she has led early and mid-stage digital health concept teams to grow from conceptual-based or research-grade algorithm solutions, to industry-grade digital solutions. With a patient-centric focus, Yajing’s team is committed to providing patients and HCPs with beyond-molecule solutions that produce additional benefit, but at less cost to society. In order to bring the promise of personalised healthcare to life, there are 4 key focus areas: Early detection and accurate diagnosis, Individualised care, Access to optimal care and Remote care and monitoring.

speaker biographies

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