In this section

PostDoc & PhD students

Dr Vikki Revell

Dr Vikki Revell’s research focuses on understanding how the circadian system, that drives 24 rhythms in physiology and behaviour, is altered in people living with dementia. Her research aims to develop circadian-targeted interventions, in particular modifying environmental lighting, to improve clinical symptoms and quality of life.

Research page

Dr Ullrich Bartsch

Ullrich’s current research is centred on the neurophysiology of sleep: how it changes across the lifespan and its role in psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. He investigates sleep at multiple levels; from single-unit recordings in rodents to high-density EEG and large cross-sectional or longitudinal datasets in humans.

Research page

Dr Kirsten Jensen

Kirsten works as part of the Synthetic Biology group, which aims to develop point-of-care diagnostics for the detection of infections in people living with dementia. Rapid diagnosis and treatment should help reduce hospital admissions and improve the care pathway. We are currently working on a point-of-care device for the early detection of urinary tract infections.

Research page

Amer Marzuki

Amer develops and maintains the web application that is being used by clinicians to monitor people living with dementia remotely. The web application displays important information regarding patient wellbeing, as well as generating time-sensitive alerts that may require intervention by clinicians.

Francesca Palermo

Francesca’s primary goal is to detect episodes of agitation in people living with dementia by applying a deep learning model on in-home monitoring data. Agitation is a neuropsychiatric symptom that negatively impacts the Activities of Daily Living and independence of individuals. Detecting agitation episodes can assist in providing early and timely interventions.

Helen Lai

Helen is interested in the translation of group-level data to address individual-level needs. Working with health and social care providers as well as people with dementia, she is testing the implementation of digitally-enabled care within the local community. In parallel, she is extracting trends among people with dementia in population data, using domains such as multimorbidity and frailty to predict clinical outcomes such as infections.

Martin Tran

Martin works as part of the Synthetic Biology group, where they aim to develop novel point-of-care diagnostics for early detection of infections in people living with dementia. His role is to use molecular biology techniques to characterise the urinary microbiome and bacterial strains responsible for infections, to identify potential biomarkers for detection.

Michael David

Michael uses detailed MRI brain scans to assess damage within patient’s noradrenaline centre. The brain chemical noradrenaline is particularly important for attention. Attention - focusing on relevant information - is often affected early in Alzheimer’s disease. Patients notice early and disabling problems with attention and concentration, which worsen memory problems.

Alina Serban

The aim of Alina’s research is to monitor routines of behaviour from activities of daily living in people with dementia. Specifically, she is looking into extracting activities of daily living from environmental sensors and grouping such activities into routines of behaviour using artificial intelligence.

Research page

Nan Fletcher-Lloyd

Nan’s research focuses on investigating the use of remote monitoring technologies to improve the provision of healthcare for people living with dementia. Through machine learning techniques and data analytics, her work looks to predict agitation risk in order to inform delivery of meaningful and timely interventions, both pharmacological and non-pharmacological.

Alexander Capstick

Alexander’s work is focused on building machine learning models that can make clinical predictions about people’s health. Specifically, he is working on making models adaptable to changing environments and researching into how they can learn from few examples.

Dr Emma-Jane Mallas

Emma is a post-doctoral researcher using multi-modal brain imaging techniques with detailed cognitive assessment to understand the basis of memory impairment in health and disease. Understanding the mechanisms underpinning specific types of memory failure may help to inform future treatment development.

Research page

Dr Magda Kolanko

Magda’s research is focused on using at-home digital evaluation of sleep and night-time behaviour to develop clinically relevant biomarkers that would allow early disease detection and serve as novel clinical outcome measures for drug trials. Her research also looks at the neuroimaging and fluid biomarkers of Alzheimer’s Disease and how these are related to sleep changes and disease progression.

Research page

Dr Ciro della Monica

Ciro’s research interests lie in exploring the relationship between sleep and cognitive function in healthy aging and in people living with dementia to determine if sleep features or changes are a predictor of cognitive decline, or if they correlate with disease progression. If so, these can be a target for interventions.

Research page

Martina Del Giovane

Martina’s research aims to develop and validate a computerised cognitive assessment showing sensitivity to dementia-related impairments and to different dementia subtypes. This tool could improve the initial diagnosis of dementia and help monitor patients remotely, tracking disease progression and response to treatment.

Karl (Gus) Zimmerman

Karl is currently a post-doctoral researcher working on projects investigating brain health in retired professional athletes and military veterans. The projects aim to use advanced MRI and fluid biomarker analysis to provide quantitative measures of brain health for improved patient care and prognosis.

Research page

Dr Niall Bourke

Niall is a postdoctoral research associate utilising advance neuroimaging techniques and large population MRI datasets to better understand the brain behavioural relationships on an individual level. He has been involved in the development process and application of remote cognitive testing in traumatic brain injury patients.

Research page

Dr Kiran Kumar Guruswamy Ravindran

Kiran is working towards validating different technologies for monitoring sleep physiology in people living with dementia longitudinally at home. His work primarily focuses on measuring qualitative sleep at different granularities ranging from simple bed presence to sleep EEG using commercially available devices such as Dreem 2 Headband.

Research page

Maria Raposo de Lima

Social robots and conversational agents hold significant promise to support people living with dementia at home. Maria’s research aims to design a robotic conversational system which can engage and support end-users in daily living activities for sustained benefit, as well as learning their needs and preferences. She is investigating data mining of human-robot interactions, user engagement, and technology adherence.

Ghena Hammour

Ghena’s research focuses on the development of Hearables, an in-ear device, for neural and physiological monitoring in patients with chronic diseases. This aims to improve patients' quality of life by providing the means for unobtrusive and continuous sensing at an affordable cost.

Dr Neil Graham

Neil’s interest is in how head injury relates to neurodegenerative disease, with the aim of preventing and developing treatments for dementia after TBI. In civilian, military and sporting settings, he investigates tools to diagnose dementias such as CTE and identify patients at highest risk of long-term problems, before symptoms appear.

Research page

Hazel May

Blast traumatic brain injury (bTBI) affects military and civilians and due to recent wars, their prevalence has increased. Milder cases of bTBI can go undetected and leave the brain vulnerable. Hazel’s work consists of investigating the outcome of blast shockwaves on the brain using an animal model. She investigates the physiological and neurological effects over time and will compare it to a computational model and human findings to better understand mild bTBI.

Dr Adrien Rapeaux

Adrien is an electronic engineer working on UWB radar as a non-contact device for people living with Dementia to help them and their carers monitor their sleep and activity patterns. His work focuses on validating radar measurements against gold-standard instruments in laboratories mimicking home environments, called Living Labs.

Research page

Dr Thomas Parker

Dr Tom Parker is a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded clinical lecturer in Neurology. His research aims to use advanced brain imaging techniques to better understand the changes that occur in the brains of individuals living with, or at risk of, dementia.

Research page

Elaheh Kalantari

Elaheh’s PhD focus is on multimodal data analysis for sleep monitoring across the 24-hour day to identify any abnormalities. The overall aim of her research project is to develop multimodal monitoring using wearable and ambient sensors that can identify changes in sleep patterns accurately in a home environment, and which may indicate the early onset of dementia.

Research page

Dr Hamed Haddadi

Hamed is a Reader in Human-Centred Systems at the Dyson School of Design Engineering at The Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London. He leads the Systems and Algorithms Laboratory and is an Academic Fellow of the Data Science Institute. He is interested in User-Centred Systems, IoT, Applied Machine Learning, and Data Security & Privacy. Within the DRI project, he works on efficient and privacy-preserving AI models to work in the individuals’ home environment.

Research page

Nivedita Bijlani

Nivedita’s research focuses on fast, scalable and interpretable anomaly detection in sensor data collected from the homes of dementia patients. The objective is to utilise movement, environmental, physiological, wellbeing and cognitive assessment data to identify digital biomarkers of conditions such as UTI, with the aim of effective remote monitoring.

Research page

Alan Bannon

Alan’s work is focussed on developing and deploying ultra-compact radar systems to study, monitor, and assist people living with dementia. By making our networked radars extremely low-cost, we provide complete coverage in complex domestic environments and generate high quality data that allows us to understand and support the lives of people living with dementia.

Research page

Dr Samaneh Kouchaki

Samaneh’s research focuses on developing clinically applicable machine learning methods capable of processing sensory data from people living with dementia in the home setting. This is done through representation learning, data fusion, adaptability to data changes and noise, and interpretable predictive learning.

Research page

Established in 2017 by its principal funder the Medical Research Council, in partnership with Alzheimer's Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK, The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is the UK’s leading biomedical research institute dedicated to neurodegenerative diseases.

Funding provided by the

Medical Research Council

Funding provided by the

Alzheimer's Society

Funding provided by

Alzheimer's Research UK

PostDoc & PhD students