Population and Data Sciences
Led by Professor Paul Foster
Deputy Lead: Dr Nikolas Pontikos
The theme unites individuals across the joint Moorfields Eye Hospital/UCL Institute of Ophthalmology site together with the wider UCL community and across the UK. It comprises teams with interests in genomics, multiomics, population genetics, image analysis and data science (including machine and deep learning) pipelines.
We have an outward-facing approach which, through collaboration with others active in epidemiological and data sciences around the UK, creates critical mass to drive this research space forwards.
We draw on large cohorts such as UK Biobank and EPIC Norfolk, combined with routinely collected data available through record linkage to NHS records. These together with large-scale hospital data curation projects such as HDR UK’s INSIGHT Hub put the UK at the forefront of research in very large, inter-connected datasets, which form an excellent substrate for advanced analytical techniques such as machine learning and deep learning.