About Me

I am a Senior Lecturer at the School of Science and Technology at City St George’s, University of London. I am part of the Department of Computer Science. I am a member of the giCentre and CitAI St George’s my research focus is on the processing, analysis, interpretation and visualisation of data, primarily related with biomedical experimentation.

I have supervised to completion 8 Ph.D. students (Yin, Blazakis, Solis-Lemus, Jawaid, Leandrou, Karabag, Olliverre, Ananda) and I am currently supervising 6, 4 as first supervisor (Ibadulla, Arafat, Ortega-Ruiz, Brito-Pacheco) and 2 as second supervisor (Aden, Selvarathnam).

My areas of interest

My main area of research is Image Analysis. I have considerable experience with a variety of medical and biomedical data, but also with other types of data like vehicles, bees, ants, or sounds. This research covers three particular areas: the acquisition (I have worked with images from x-rays, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, light, fluorescent, confocal, multiphoton and electron microscopes) of medical and biomedical images, the analysis through algorithms, mathematical models and statistical methodologies, which provide quantitative measurements, and the interpretation of the data (2D images, 3D volumes, 2D+t videos, 3D+t volumetric time lapse data sets). This final stage is crucial, what conclusions can we draw from the images? Can we reveal something of the underlying biological processes of cells or tumours? What are the effects of drugs or treatments? By using image analysis we are able to extract a wealth of information that is present in the images we capture, and that it is not possible to obtain by simple qualitative analysis. I have analysed different biological processes - cell migration, vascular permeability, red cell velocity, neutrophil and macrophage migration - and this research has lead to many journal papers. You can check these in the Publications section.

My overall objective is to shed some light into the causes and processes of human illnesses especially cancer, and the infection or inflammation processes related to this disease. By analysing the images and videos from many experiments I hope to and contribute in finding ways to cure and prevent them.

Whilst my main focus has been in biomedical areas, the techniques applied to these images can easily be exported to any other images, images are images, data is data! Thus I have also collaborated in other different areas such as phonetics, geotechnics, computer vision, tracking of ants and bees.

Academic Background

My undergraduate degree is from the National University in Mexico (UNAM, Facultad de Ingeniería) in 1993 with the degree of Ingeniero Mecánico Electricista, (BS Mechanical and Electrical Engineering). I then obtained an M.Sc. (MSc in Communications and Signal Processing) and D.I.C. from Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine in 1994. From 1995 until 2000 I worked in Mexico for several years as a Lecturer at ITESM and ITAM teaching Communications and Electromagnetics related subjects. From 2001 until 2004 I returned to the United Kingdom to obtain a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Warwick University under the supervision of Dr. Abhir Bhalerao in the area of Medical Image Analysis with a thesis on Multiresolution Volumetric Texture Segmentation. At the same time, I worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick. From 2005 to 2011 I worked as a Research Associate and then Research Fellow at The University of Sheffield in the Tumour Microcirculation Group. In May 2011 I joined the University of Sussex as a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering. I moved to City, University of London in July 2013.