Claudia Vanea

Claudia is a final year Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Health Data Science DPhil student at the University of Oxford, supervised by Christoffer Nellaker and Cecilia Lindgren. Her work has focused on understanding healthy and disease variation in human placenta histology by building a hierarchical deep learning pipeline for identifying rich whole-slide phenotypes from the single-cell level. The 4-stage pipeline starts at the smallest readily detectable unit in histology, the nucleus, and builds through cell, tissue microstructure, and diseased region prediction for ultimately assisting in patient-level diagnosis. Whilst she built the pipeline originally for placenta histology, it has been extended to liver, adipose, kidney, and cross-organ analysis by other researchers.

Over the course of her DPhil, Claudia proposed and co-taught 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 from UCL.