We are very pleased to welcome:
Professor Ian Halliday
Department of Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease
Professor of Computational Modelling in Cardiovascular Disease
Ian recently joined the University of Sheffield’s Department of Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease.
He is a member of the Imaging research theme and will be working in the Mathematical Modelling in Medicine Group. His appointment builds on the important work of Rod Hose and Pat Lawford, who are now retired but remain very active as Emeritus Chairs.
Ian will be active in expanding the role of computational modelling in cardiovascular disease, aiming to develop a long-term strategy for basic and translational research in computational modelling, applied to diseases of the circulation.
Ian’s recent research is in the area of fluid dynamics, specifically modelling the dynamics of complex fluids at a range of scales, from interfacial flows, through suspensions of deformable drops and vesicles (i.e. colloids and blood) to nematic liquid crystalline fluids, always aiming to understand the emergent macroscopic system behaviours.
He is also interested in hydrokinetics (applied kinetic theory) and a number of fundamental issues relating to lattice Boltzmann equation hydrodynamics (a niche CFD tool), especially chromodynamic multicomponent lattice Boltzmann simulation.
Here, his recent work has focused on high density contrast interfaces, numerical stability, the link to classical kinetic theory and, not least, utility.
Dr Neil Stewart
Department of Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease
European Respiratory Society Marie Curie Research Fellow
Neil obtained a degree in physics from Durham University in 2012, and a PhD in magnetic resonance imaging physics from the University of Sheffield in 2016.
In 2017, he moved to Hokkaido University to undertake a post-doctoral research fellowship funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
He is currently undertaking a European Respiratory Society (ERS) Marie Curie post-doctoral research fellowship in the POLARIS group at the University of Sheffield on lung MRI in infants in collaboration with the Center for Pulmonary Imaging Research (CPIR) at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
Dr Valentin Radu
Department of Computer Science
Lecturer in Pervasive/Ubiquitous Computing
Valentin joined the Department of Computer Science in August 2020. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, exploring deep learning optimisation for efficient inference on edge computing devices.
He received his PhD in 2017 from the University of Edinburgh, where he researched intelligent mobile systems for sensing applications.
His research has been influenced by his visits at the University of Cambridge, in the Mobile Systems Group (2016), Intel R&D Ireland (2017) and Samsung (2015).
Dr Ali Khurram
School of Clinical Dentistry
Senior Clinical Lecturer
Honorary Consultant Pathologist
Dr Ali Khurram is a Senior Clinical Lecturer and Consultant Pathologist at the University of Sheffield.
His postdoctoral training was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), UK as a part of which he also trained as a Diagnostic Oral and Maxillofacial Pathologist.
Following the successful completion of FRCPath in 2016, he was appointed as a Senior Clinical Lecturer and Consultant Pathologist at the School of Clinical Dentistry, the University of Sheffield.
He has a number of local, regional and national Clinical and Educational roles including:
- Clinical lead for the Sheffield Diagnostic Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology Service.
- Lead for undergraduate BDS Pathology Teaching.
- Educational supervision of core and specialist oral pathology trainees.
- Secretary and Webmaster- British Society for Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology (BSOMP).
- Digital Advisor and Webmaster- Pathological Society of Great Britain & Ireland.
- Member of the Educational Committee- European Society of Integrated and Digital Pathology.
He has previously held the roles of Audit Lead for the hospital as well as Molecular Pathology Lead for South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Network.
He is actively involved in research and leads his own research group called NEOPATH with a particular interest in undertaking clinically relevant research to benefit head and neck cancer patients, salivary gland pathobiology and role of the tumour microenvironment in cancer metastasis and bone invasion.
Over the last few years, he has been actively involved in investigating the use of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, exploring their role in pathological diagnosis and prediction of prognosis prediction.
Dr Chris Toseland
Department of Oncology and Metabolism
Senior Lecturer in Cancer Biology
Dr Chris Toseland is a Senior Lecturer and MRC Career Development Awardee at the University of Sheffield Department of Oncology and Metabolism.
He received a BSc Biochemistry degree from the University of Wales – Aberystwyth in 2006 then commenced a PhD at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research/University of London.
His thesis focused upon the biochemical and biophysical characterisation of DNA helicases.
At the end of his PhD, Chris was awarded an EMBO Long Term Fellowship to move to the LMU–Munich to work on single molecule studies with myosin motors.
After 3 years, Chris relocated to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry with a research focus on genome organisation. He then established his research group, Toseland Lab, at the University of Kent in 2015, when he gained the MRC Career Development Award.
Dr Artur Gower
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Lecturer in Dynamics
Artur’s background is in applying mathematics (BSc, MSc, PhD) to understand the mechanics of soft materials, and material microstructure.
He mostly develops code and mathematical models for
- wave scattering and propagation
- soft matter constitutive modelling
- random media
- inverse problems
Neda Azarmehr
School of Clinical Dentistry
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, funded by CR UK
Neda is working as a Research Fellow as part of the NEOPATH Research Group.
She is currently working on developing AI models for early oral cancer detection on the multidisciplinary collaborative CR UK funded ANTICIPATE study with Dr Ali Khurram and Professor Nasir Rajpoot (University of Warwick).
Neda was awarded a PhD scholarship (2017-2021) at the University of Lincoln (school of computer science), in collaboration with Imperial College London to develop automated models using deep learning, computer vision algorithm, and medical image analysis to assess the left ventricle function which enables physicians to analyse cardiac echo images more precisely.
Neda has an undergraduate degree in Health Information Technology, and a MSc in Big Data Analytics. She has a strong interest in application of Artificial Intelligence to medical applications.
Before joining the University of Sheffield, Neda worked as an associate lecturer in the field of Computer Science at multiple UK higher education institutions.
Neda’s research interests are mainly centred on algorithm development, computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, and medical image analysis.
She has published research articles in national and international journals and conferences. Neda is a reviewer for several peer-reviewed international journals.
