Vision and Eyes - Research Group

Find out about the members of the Vision and Eyes research group.

Staff List

PhD students

Ana Šemrov

I hold an MSc in Psychology from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. I joined the UCL GOS Institute of Child Health as a PhD student in October 2019, funded by a Fight for Sight PhD studentship and the Ulverscroft Foundation. I am interested in resilience mechanisms that help shaping quality of life outcomes of children/young people with visual impairment and their families. My project aims: (1) to identify the key predictive factors that shape quality of life outcomes of visually impaired children/young people and their families; (2) to identify the critical time points at which interventions may moderate the effect of these factors, and; (3) to propose an intervention that will improve quality of life of these children and their families. In my research, I am using data collected during our group’s project Measuring Vision-Related Quality of Life and Functional Vision as well as collecting novel data focused on the predictive factors of developmental outcomes.

Contact me at ana.semrov.19@ucl.ac.uk. 

Lucie Teoh

I hold a Masters degree in Public Health (Health Economics stream) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and have a BSc in Pharmacology. In 2015 - 2018, prior to becoming a PhD student, I worked within the Vision and Eyes Team as a research assistant for the British Childhood Visual Impairment and Blindness Study 2 (BCVIS2). In September 2018, my PhD project started, which aims to explore the health, education and social outcomes of children with visual impairment and blindness, from the point of diagnosis, across childhood and into early adulthood. The study will use linked administrative hospital and school records of children identified in two nationally representative surveillance studies (BCVIS). This project will provide novel, longitudinal data on healthcare use, costs and survival for this rare group of children and enable future cost-effectiveness analyses of emerging treatments and inform service provision. This project is funded through the UCL-Birkbeck MRC doctoral training programme.

Contact me at l.teoh@ucl.ac.uk.
Follow @luciejayt 

Siân Handley

I hold an MSc in Clinical Ophthalmology at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology. I have dual registration with the HCPC as both an Orthoptist and a Clinical Scientist, which I utilise in both my clinical practice at GOSH and my research. 

The NIHR awarded me a Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship to pursue my research in Homonymous Hemianopia in Childhood. This PhD aims to firstly investigate the clinical phenotype of homonymous hemianopia in childhood and the resulting effects on a child's visual function and vision-related quality of life. Secondly to pilot a trial of prism-based intervention in a subgroup of these children. Follow @HHICProject

Contact me at sian.handley.10@ucl.ac.uk.

Siegfried Wagner

I qualified in Medicine from the University of Oxford in 2012 having intercalated in neurosciences in 2009. I moved to London to commence ophthalmology speciality training thereafter and, in 2016, became an academic clinical fellow funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) exploring machine learning for retinal image analysis. 

My PhD focuses on improving our understanding of how the eye changes in systemic diseases, such as dementia and cardiovascular disease. Using retinal imaging with both traditional statistics and modern artificial intelligence techniques, I am evaluating the potential of leveraging retinal structure as a proxy for our general physiology. I am funded as a clinical research training fellow by the Medical Research Council (MRC). 

Contact me at s.wagner@ucl.ac.uk.
Follow @sktywagner

---

 

Boyu Chen

I hold an MSc in Health Data Science at the UCL Institute of Health Informatics (IHI). My research interest focuses on applying computational methods to healthcare data. Prior to becoming a PhD student, my research was about extracting and summarising information from unstructured clinical free-text.  

 

In September 2021, I became a PhD student at UCL IHI. My research project focuses on developing an AI system to support the diagnosis and study of anterior uveitis, which is the inflammation in the front of the eye and can impair the vision of patients, especially children.

Honorary members

Phillippa (Phil) Cumberland

Phil came to the UCL Institute of Child Health in 2002 to work on vision research and has been a biostatistician for the Ulverscroft Vision Research Group until 2019.

Vasiliki (Sila) Bountziouka

Sila joined the UCL Institute of Child Health in 2012 to work on the Size and Lung function In Children (SLIC) study as a post-doctoral research associate in statistics, aiming to explore differences in body physique and composition that contribute to ethnic differences in lung function in children. She then joined the Vision and Eyes team in 2016, where she stayed until 2018, to work on the CLOSER initiative on harmonising the ophthalmic measurements across the UK birth cohorts and investigate time trends and inequalities in visual health. She is currently employed by the University of Leicester as a biomedical statistician.

Ana Maria Portugal

Ana joined in 2015 as a Life Study PhD student wanting to study the associations between eye health, oculomotor control and attention early in life, a collaboration between the Vision and Eyes Group and the Babylab at the Center for Brain and Cognitive Development in Birkbeck. During her PhD, she investigated the influence of early life visual experiences (i.e. infant touchscreen use) on attention control and executive function. Together with the Vision and Eyes Group, she has been studying early life touchscreen media use and its associations with vision acuity, stereovision, and eye problems. In 2020, she finished her PhD and moved to Sweden where she is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Neurodevelopmental Disorders at Karolinska Institutet (KIND).