People
The team
Group lead
Steven Niederer
Group lead, Imperial College London, Stanford University
Professor Steven Niederer received a Bachelor of Engineering majoring in Engineering science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, before completing a DPhil in Computer Science at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He received a UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) post-doctoral fellowship on modelling heart failure before being appointed as a lecturer at King’s College London. Since joining King’s College Steven has developed a research group focused on developing and applying computational simulation and image analysis techniques to better understand cardiac physiology, pathologies and treatments. His work is characterised by working across disciplines spanning statistics, computer science, engineering, physiology and cardiology.
Project manager
Mojiba Khanum
Project manager, Imperial College London · CVD-Net
Mojiba Khanum received her Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Sciences from University College London in 2019. She has worked at Imperial College London since 2021, joining the CEMRG team in November 2024 as Project Manager for CVD Net (Networks of Cardiovascular Digital Twins) which is an EPSRC funded project looking to create cardiac digital twins for the monitoring and treatment of Pulmonary Hypertension.
Sejal Varsani
Project manager, Imperial College London · MiMeC
Sejal Varsani received a BSc in Biochemistry from King's College London and an MRes in Cancer Biology and Informatics from Imperial College London. Prior to joining Imperial College London in 2025, she worked in the medical communications industry, gaining experience in scientific strategy and project delivery. In 2026, she joined CEMRG as Project Manager for the Modelling Informed Medicine Centre (MiMeC), where she supports multidisciplinary research programmes focused on the application of computational modelling to medicine.
Postdoctoral researcher
Maximilian Balmus
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London · CVD-Net, MiMeC
Dr Max Balmus graduated from King's College London with a BEng and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, where he specialised in developing new fluid-solid interaction methods for simulating cardiac valve mechanics using multiple overlapping grids. He joined CEMRG in 2024, and since then has been working on building digital twins for pulmonary arterial hypertension patients using implantable monitoring device data, as part of the CVD-Net and MiMeC projects. This work aims to improve patient stratification as well as to enable personalised medicine.
Tiffany Baptiste
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London · CVD-Net
Tiffany received her undergraduate degree in Bioengineering from the University of Sheffield in 2019. There, her research project focussed on simulating remodelling in skeletal muscle. She then went on to read for a MSc in Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London where she specialised in biomechanics and mechanobiology. Tiffany's desire to make clinical impact through research led her to join the CEMRG team in October 2021. Her PhD project aims to study the role of stiffness in the development of fibrosis in the left atrium. She will also investigate how changes atrial stiffness impact the progression atrial fibrillation.
Rosie Barrows
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London · MiMeC
Rosie studied interdisciplinary Engineering Science at the University of Oxford before moving to London for her postgraduate studies. She completed her PhD at King’s College London and Imperial College London, where she wrote her thesis on the use of computational whole-heart models to investigate atrial fibrillation. Rosie is now part of the Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre (MiMeC) at Imperial College London, collaborating with GSK to develop computational models of the kidney. These models could be used across early drug development: to identify nephrotoxic compounds at candidate selection, to translate in vitro data into predicted kidney effects during preclinical safety assessment, and to inform safe and therapeutic doses ahead of first-in-human studies.
Ludovica Cicci
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
Ludovica Cicci obtained her BSc in Mathematics and her MSc in Applied Mathematics at Sapienza Università di Roma. In 2021 she completed a PhD degree at Politecnico di Milano, where she was involved in an ERC project for the construction of cardiac digital twins, focusing on the development of reduced order models to speed up the computation of mechanics simulations. After one more year at Politecnico di Milano as post-doc in mathematical models and methods for personalized and precision medicine, she joined CEMRG as research associate in November 2022. Making use of virtual simulations on patient-specific geometries, she is currently investigating the impact of electrodes location and other electrophysiology parameters on electrocardiograms.
Cesare Corrado
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
Dr Cesare Corrado holds an MSc in Aerospace Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan and a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Padua, Italy. His research focuses on computational cardiac modelling, machine learning, and the integration of clinical data to develop patient-specific models for improving the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. His current work includes predicting the outcomes of atrial fibrillation ablation and quantifying the effectiveness of antiarrhythmic drugs for treating ventricular tachycardia. He is also interested in model uncertainty and predictive performance, with the aim of developing reliable computational tools to support clinical decision-making.
Zaid Elhusseini
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London · MiMeC
Zaid Elhusseini, PhD, is a Senior Research Associate at Imperial College London developing lung digital twins and mechanistic models of early COPD. His current research integrates spatial and single-cell omics, multi-omics and longitudinal cohort data to understand disease mechanisms and progression. His broader research interests include resilience to smoking-related lung injury, lung function decline and smoking cessation.
Yuzhang Ge
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London · MiMeC
Yuzhang Ge is a Research Associate at Imperial College London, working on computational modelling of renal fibrosis and the evaluation of anti-fibrotic therapies within a collaborative programme involving Imperial, Cambridge and GSK. He completed his PhD in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on mechanistic modelling, Bayesian inference, uncertainty quantification, and computational approaches for translational biomedical research.
Angela Lee
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
Dr Angela WC Lee received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her main research interest is in modelling cardiac resynchronization therapy using patient-specific models of the heart. Previously, her work focused on modelling the chronic changes in the heart’s electrophysiology, mechanics and geometry due to cardiac resynchronisation therapy and the effect that these changes will have on the optimal lead location. The current focus of her work is on developing a product for image-guided optimisation of wireless endocardial pacemakers for patients undergoing cardiac resynchronization therapy. This project, in collaboration with medical imaging companies, device manufacturers, and clinicians, aims to translate image-analysis and advanced simulations tools into the clinic to assist in pre-procedural planning for wireless endocardial CRT.
Alexandre Lewalle
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
Dr Alex Lewalle completed his PhD in physics at Cambridge, and subsequently directed his research toward the physics/biology interface. His general research interest is in the mechanisms of force generation in biological systems, from the molecular to the whole-organ scale. His earlier research, combining experimental and modelling approaches, has included measurements of the myosin motor protein that produces muscle contraction, and of red-blood-cell membrane deformation. He has also modelled the dynamics of actin filament growth, the mechanical driving force in cell motility. Since joining CEMRG, his research has focused on understanding, through modelling and computational simulations, the roles played by electrophysiological activity, sarcomere-level molecular interactions, and cardiac tissue structure in producing heart muscle contraction. By comparing theoretical biophysical models with clinical data, he investigates the biophysical mechanisms of cardiac function in healthy hearts and in heart failure.
Abdul Qayyum
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
Dr Abdul Qayyum received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Malaysia, in 2018, and was then a lecturer in computer and information science at the University of Burgundy, France. Dr Qayyum joined the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London in 2023, and develops deep learning models for medical image segmentation, including whole-heart segmentation from CT and MRI.
Shuang Qian
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
Dr Shuang Qian received her undergraduate degree in Electronic and Electrical engineering at the University of Birmingham, UK, before completing a PhD degree at the same university. Her PhD project is about modelling the cardiac electrodynamics in a larval zebrafish heart incorporating detailed cellular arrangements and intercellular connectivity. Since joining CEMRG in 2020, her work focused on assessing and optimising electrotherapy to improve the function of implanted devices by constructing and validating computational models, based on clinical images and electrophysiological recorded data. Her current research interest also includes integrating advanced machine learning approaches with models for direct applications in current clinical practice and making digital twins from data sets in the Biobank that evolve through time.
Cristobal Rodero
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
Cristobal Rodero received his bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the Universitat de València, Spain in 2016. Cristobal completed a MSc of Research in Mathematics jointly awarded by Universitat de València and Universitat Politècnica de València. At the same time, he completed a second MSc in Computational Mathematics by Universitat Jaume I in Castellón. Cristobal started his PhD in 2017 in Biomedical Engineering, both in CEMRG and in CMIB (Cardiac Modelling and Imaging Biomarkers) group, supervised by Profs Steven Niederer and Pablo Lamata. His PhD focussed on studying shape and function in the heart and how they interact using simulations. He also worked on calibration of models using emulators. In February 2022 he started a position at CEMRG as a research assistant studying cardiac remodelling in longitudinal studies.
Hossein Shamohammadi
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London · MiMeC
Hossein completed his BSc and MSc in Mechanical Engineering at Shiraz University, followed by a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Warwick. He is currently a researcher at Imperial College London. His research focuses on in-silico modelling, digital twins, and computational approaches to respiratory physiology, as well as the development and regulatory evaluation of medical devices.
José Alonso Solís-Lemus
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
José Alonso graduated from Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de México (ITAM) in Telematics Engineering (2013) and Applied Mathematics (2014). He received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering working at the School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering (SMCSE) at City, University of London. His PhD research focused on the automated analysis of moving patterns in migrating cells’ movement. Moving his focus "closer to the patient", José Alonso joined CEMRG early in 2019 as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate, where he is currently developing image processing and computer vision algorithms for the analysis of cardiac images.
Devran Ugurlu
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
Dr Devran Ugurlu received his bachelor's degree in Mathematics Engineering and master's degree in Computational Science and Engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Sabanci University, Turkey. His research mainly focuses on medical image analysis. For his PhD and his first postdoc project at Istanbul Technical University, he worked with automatic segmentation of fiber tracts from brain diffusion MRI. He moved to the UK in September 2020 and has been working as a postdoc with cardiac MRI images since. His current work involves automatically creating patient-specific biventricular and 4-chamber meshes to model the patient's heart anatomy using deep-learning methods.
Bei Zhou
Postdoctoral researcher, Imperial College London
Dr Bei Zhou received his Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Sydney, Australia, and subsequently completed his PhD in Machine Learning and Discrete Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, where his work contributed to breaking several longstanding world records on a complex combinatorial optimisation problem that had remained open for more than 25 years. He joined Imperial College London as a Research Associate in 2024. His current research focuses on computational modelling and neural operators for simulations in cardiac digital twins. He is also a senior software developer and the creator of the Condorcet Domain Library (CDL) and TorchCor.
PhD student
Amelia Alt
PhD student, Imperial College London
Amelia is a PhD student at Imperial College London, developing cardiac digital twins to model cardiac resynchronisation therapy in patients with congenital heart disease. Before joining Imperial, Amelia completed an MSc in Biomedical Engineering at Queen Mary University of London, where she worked in Dr Caroline Roney's lab applying explainable machine learning to predict catheter ablation therapy outcomes in atrial fibrillation. She has previously worked clinically in the NHS as well as in medical communications with global pharmaceutical clients.
Edward Ashton
PhD student, Imperial College London · CVD-Net
Edward joined CEMRG in 2025, where he develops multiscale, whole-heart electro-mechanical models to improve treatment for patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension. His ambition is to integrate in-silico tools with uncertainty quantification methods to support clinical decision-making and improve postoperative outcomes. He brings a background in computational modelling across biomaterials research and the medical device industry. Edward completed his integrated master’s degree at the University of Oxford in 2021. For his master’s project he developed electrospun nanocomposite scaffolds for drug-release applications, combining nanoscale imaging with in-silico optimisation methods. Pursuing his interest in computational modelling, he worked as an analytical research engineer, applying finite element and computational fluid dynamics tools to medical device development. This work showed how digital twins can accelerate and de-risk innovation within regulatory frameworks.
Isaac Hayden
PhD student, Imperial College London
Isaac completed an integrated Master's in Mathematics at Durham University in 2023. While specialising in Riemannian geometry and functional analysis, he also explored the use of neural networks to solve differential equations in his dissertation project. He then worked as a pharmacometric data scientist in a HealthTech start-up delivering precision chemotherapy dosing. There he developed Bayesian pharmacokinetic models to describe drug exposure in special patient populations, and investigated further extensions using machine learning. In October 2024 he joined CEMRG as a PhD student within the Statistics and Machine Learning Centre for Doctoral Training programme at Imperial College London. His research focuses on methods for multifidelity modelling and experimental design to improve translation between animal and human experiments for cardiac safety assessment.
Aditi Kulkarni
PhD student, Imperial College London
Aditi graduated from Imperial College London in 2025 with an undergraduate degree in Medical Biosciences. For her final year project, she joined CEMRG to work on modelling the effects of female hormones on atrial fibrillation susceptibility in female physiology. Aditi’s PhD focuses on the systematic calibration of a cohort of patient-specific four-chamber models within a multiscale electromechanics framework to investigate myocardial remodelling in valvular heart disease.
Arthur Lefebvre
PhD student, Imperial College London
Arthur holds both a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, specializing in Telecommunications and Artificial Intelligence from the Université de Mons (UMONS). He further completed a Master of Science in Bioengineering with a Medical Specialization at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), as a recipient of the BAEF fellowship. His academic work has centered on the intersection of AI and cardiovascular imaging. Arthur previously served as a Research Assistant in the Trayanova Lab at Johns Hopkins University, where he contributed to segmentation projects focused on atrial structures, ventricles, and the quantification of scar and fibrosis in late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) MRI scans. In 2024, he joined CEMRG as PhD student in AI and Machine Learning within the AI4Health program at Imperial College London. His research centers on developing Trustworthy Digital Twins for Healthcare, specifically assessing the credibility of patient-specific cardiac simulation models through advanced computational modeling and AI. In collaboration with the FDA and industry partners, Arthur's work aims to bridge research with clinical application, driving solutions that are FDA-ready.
Shambhavi Malik
PhD student, Imperial College London
Shambhavi graduated in 2023 with an Integrated Dual BTech–MTech in Biomedical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi. During her studies, she completed research internships in the UK, Canada, and Germany, focusing on structural and biophysical modeling of the heart. She is currently a PhD student at Imperial College London within the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Smart Medical Imaging. Her research centers on integrating multi-modal imaging and ECGI data to develop and calibrate patient-specific digital twins for investigating the electrophysiology of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
Molly Monks
PhD student, Imperial College London · MiMeC
Molly earned an integrated master's degree in Mathematics from the University of Oxford in 2022. She then worked as an operational research analyst in the Civil Service, conducting modelling and analysis for Social Security Scotland, Defra and HMRC, before joining CEMRG in February 2026. Her research project focuses on modelling forced expiration in early COPD.
Sheng-Ya Wang
PhD student, Imperial College London
Sheng-Ya Wang graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) and a Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Statistics. Her Honours project focused on optimising a MATLAB workflow to fit a finite element model that approximates 3D strains throughout the left ventricle from DENSE image-derived displacements. She has research experience implementing and refining convolutional neural networks for supervised keypoint detection on spinopelvic radiographs, as well as developing image processing algorithms for laser speckle imaging to enhance image registration accuracy. Sheng-Ya joined CEMRG in 2025 as a PhD student, developing and calibrating mathematical models of the cardiopulmonary system. Her work aims to investigate the dynamic interactions between cardiovascular and respiratory control mechanisms to predict physiological responses across various states, such as exercise.
Wei Zhong
PhD student, Imperial College London
Wei Zhong joined CEMRG in October 2024 as a PhD student (4-year BHF-DTP). Before that, Wei completed a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Statistical Science at University College London and later pursued a Master's degree in Applied Computational Science and Engineering at Imperial College London. Prior to his Master's studies, Wei worked as a Research Assistant at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the Institute of Medical Engineering (2021–2022). His experience spans computational mathematics, numerical modelling, data science, machine learning, and statistical analysis, with a keen interest in translational medicine and its applications in healthcare. . Wei’s research focuses on creating sex-specific cardiac digital twins to model multi-scale differences in heart function and disease presentation influenced by sex.
Visiting researcher
María Termenón Rivas
Visiting researcher, Other
María received her bachelor's degree in Industrial Electronics and Automation Engineering from the Universidade de Vigo, Spain, and a master's degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain, specialising in bioelectronics and medical technology. She is currently a PhD student in the CoMMLab research group at the Universitat de València, where her research focuses on stratifying therapies for patients with atrial fibrillation using digital twin simulations. In September 2026, she joined CEMRG for a research visit as part of her PhD. Her current project focuses on investigating how to personalise the electrophysiological properties of cardiac digital twins using non-invasive electrical recordings.
The group over the years
August 2026 
September 2025 
July 2025 
Fickle Heart conference, Cambridge, June 2024 
June 2022
Collaborators
- Dr Christoph Augustin
Assistant Professor, Division of Biophysics, Gottfried Schatz Research Center, Medical University of Graz.
- Professor Martin Bishop
Professor in Computational Cardiac Electrophysiology at King's College London, and a previous member of CEMRG.
- Professor Kenneth S. Campbell
Professor Department of Physiology and Division of Cardiovascular Medicine University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA
- Dr Sian Chivers
Department of Congenital Heart Disease, Evelina London Children's Hospital, and Department of Women's and Children's Health, King's College London.
- Dr Henry Chubb
Clinical Associate Professor of Paediatric Cardiac Electrophysiology, Stanford University.
- Professor Richard Clayton
Professor of Computational Physiology in the Department of Computer Science and the INSIGNEO institute for in-silico medicine at the University of Sheffield
- Dr Mark Elliott
Consultant Cardiologist, Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust.
- Professor Daniel Ennis
Professor, Department of Radiology, Stanford University.
- Professor Diane Fatkin
Molecular cardiologist with her own research group at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, Sydney. Professor in the Faculties of Medicine and Science, University of New South Wales.
- Professor William Fifer
Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York.
- Professor Sarah Filippi
Professor of Statistical Machine Learning, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London. Joint Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistics and Machine Learning at Imperial and Oxford.
- Professor Jaswinder Gill
Consultant cardiologist at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. Professor of cardiac electrophysiology at King’s College London.
- Dr Brian Halliday
National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London.
- Professor Sian Harding
Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London.
- Professor Pablo Lamata
Professor, Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow, at King's College of London.
- Professor William Louch
Professor of Medicine at the University of Oslo.
- Dr Antonio de Marvao
Clinical Senior Lecturer, Department of Women and Children's Health, King's College London. Consultant cardiologist in inherited cardiac conditions, with clinics at St Thomas' and King's College Hospitals.
- Dr Mastaneh Mokayef
Assistant Professor, Computer Electronics and Graphics Technology, Central Connecticut State University.
- Professor Michela Noseda
Professor of Cardiovascular Science, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London.
- Professor Mark O’Neill
Consultant Cardiologist at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. Professor of cardiac electrophysiology at King’s College London.
- Professor Jeremy Oakley
Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield
- Professor Chris Oates
Professor of Statistics at Newcastle University and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, UK
- Professor Steffen Petersen
Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London.
- Dr Nicolò Pini
Associate Research Scientist, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York.
- Professor Gernot Plank
Professor of computational Cardiology at the Medical University of Graz.
- Professor Fritz Prinzen
Professor of Physiology Cardiovascular Research Institute Maastricht (CARIM), Maastricht University
- Dr Ronak Rajani
Consultant Cardiologist at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. Reader in Cardiovascular Imaging at King's College London.
- Dr Imran Razzak
Associate Professor, School of Digital Public Health, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.
- Professor Aldo Rinaldi
Consultant cardiologist at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. Professor of cardiac electrophysiology at King’s College London.
- Professor John Simpson
Consultant paediatric cardiologist at Evelina London Children's Hospital, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. Honorary Professor of Paediatric and Fetal Cardiology at King's College London.
- Professor Greg Slabaugh
Professor and Director of the Digital Environment Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London.
- Dr Pawel Swietach
Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford
- Dr Ed Vigmond
Team leader in cardiac electrophysiology research at Liryc at the University of Bordeaux
- Professor Richard Wilkinson
Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield
- Professor Catherine Williamson
Consultant obstetrician at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. Professor of Women's Health at King’s College London.
- Professor Alistair Young
Professor, Auckland Bioengineering Institute, University of Auckland.
Alumni
- Anna Hekkink
- Valentin Romanov
- Adelisa Avezzù
- Samaneh Lashkarinia
- Pranav Bhagirath
- Martin Bishop
- Fernando Campos
- Manisha Sahota
- Hassan Zaidi
- Philip Gemmell
- Stefano Longobardi
- Hugh O'Brien
- Gabriel Balaban
- Caroline Mendonça Costa
- Damiano Fassina
- Elias Karabelas
- Hamed Keramati
- Sofia Monaci
- Shahrokh Rahmani
- Orod Razeghi
- Marina Riabiz
- Caroline Roney
- Matteo Salvador
- Charles Sillett
- Marina Strocchi