Claudia Vanea

Claudia is a Health Data Science DPhil student researching AI for placenta histopathology with Chris Nellaker and Cecilia Lindgren. Her work focuses on understanding healthy and disease variation in the human placenta by quantifying cellular and microanatomical changes across whole slide images. She built a four-stage deep learning pipeline which, starting at the nucleus level, hierarchically models the placenta as the composition and interaction of cells into microanatomical tissue structures. The pipeline combines object detection, classification, a graph neural network, and graph compression autoencoder to identify when sufficient biological changes occur at different scales to result in a pattern of injury that leads to adverse maternal and child health outcomes. 

Claudia teaches the CDT module for Research Software Engineering, with a focus on learning key principles for writing flexible, reusable, and collaborative-friendly research code. Prior to joining the Nellaker and Lindgren groups, she obtained a BA in Philosophy and an MSc in Computer Science with the highest honours from University College London.