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CORU's Director
Professor of Operational Research
Sonya has a PhD in physics and worked in the Government OR Services before joining CORU in 2009 from the Department of Health. She has worked on a wide range of projects relating to service delivery and innovation in health and social care, health protection policy and global health. In 2013 she was awarded a Health Foundation Improvement Science Fellowship. Her current interests include: combining quantitative and qualitative OR methods to improve services that span multiple sectors; linking national datasets to support quality improvement in services for congenital heart disease; and enhancing the effectiveness of OR in contributing to improvement.
Alejandro Diaz
CORU's Deputy Director
Associate Professor of Operational Research
Alex is an applied mathematician working on uncertainty quantification, Bayesian inference and model calibration. He is an EPSRC Fellow leading DATA-CENTRIC: Developing AccounTAble Computational Engineering Through Robust InferenCe. In this research, he is developing Bayesian techniques for numerical methods that quantify uncertainty due to computation. His continuous involvement with industrial partners has led to several projects with engineering companies, government bodies and SMEs. He has organised four study groups to strengthen the relationship between academia and industry. Alex joined CORU in September 2019, where he is developing statistical and computational methods to analyse large data sets and thus support clinical decision making.
Professor of Operational Research
Bluesky: @chrischirp.bsky.social
Christina has a background in maths and physics. From being a post-doctoral physicist, she made the leap into mathematics applied to health care in 2005 and is now Professor of Operational Research and a former CORU Director (2017-2022). Her recent work has focused paediatric intensive care and outcomes after children’s heart surgery. She was a 2016-17 Harkness fellow in Health Policy and Practice, based between Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Harvard) and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, US. Since 2021, she is co-Director of the EPSRC CHIMERA hub using mathematics and AI to improve services for patients in intensive care. She is passionate about using information to help people improve delivery of healthcare. Since May 2020, Christina has been a member of Independent SAGE and has been a frequent guest on national and international media discussing the Covid-19 situation.
Professor of Operational Research
Former Director of the unit (2007-2017), Martin joined CORU in 1996 having gained a PhD in high-energy physics. Martin has experience of working on a wide variety of problems in health and health care, spanning many clinical areas. Actively involved in many aspects of CORU's current research, he is committed to assisting those planning, delivering or evaluating health services by developing, adapting and applying operational research techniques.
Lecturer in Operational Research
Luca has a background in Industrial Engineering and Operational Research techniques gained during his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Sapienza University of Rome. In 2008 he moved to France where he earned his PhD in Genomics and Bioinformatics dealing with machine learning and dynamical modelling approaches to identify targets for cancer therapy. In 2014 he joined CORU where he applies quantitative methods to support health protection policy and to improve performance in healthcare systems.
Zella King
Research Fellow
Zella King is an academic data scientist. She gained her PhD in Organizational Psychology from Birkbeck College. Her academic career began with 15 years in business schools. Her work on human resources, careers and networks has been published in top business journals. In 2007 she was awarded a fellowship of the Advanced Institute of Management. In 2014 she took time out of academia to co-found a training company which has become commercially successful. In 2016, concerned about healthcare in ageing societies, she changed fields to focus on health data research. Her work (with UCL and UCLH colleagues) on developing machine learning models to predict demand for emergency beds at UCLH has been published in Nature Digital Medicine. She is currently working as an embedded researcher at UCLH, helping tackle some of the hospital’s operational problems, applying problem structuring, analysis and modelling to generate practical insights for decision-making.
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Research Fellow
Qi has a background in engineering and gained her PhD in signal processing and communications from Edinburgh University. Since 2016, she has been interested in developing and applying statistical methodologies to health care data, and her main research experience focused on the statistical modelling of circadian rhythm time series to answer statistical and mathematical questions on chronobiology. Qi joined CORU in April 2021, where she is working on the long-term outcomes of survival and re-operation amongst children born with congenital heart disease.
Anna Charalambidou
SPROCKET Hub Manager
Dr Anna Charalambidou holds a PhD in Language, Discourse and Communication from King’s College London. Before joining UCL in 2026, she was director of programmes at Middlesex University and taught at Middlesex, Surrey, Swansea and the European University of Cyprus. She manages SPROCKET, an NIHR/EPSRC‑funded hub improving hospital‑to‑home and education transitions for children with complex health needs. Anna oversees the Hub’s governance, strategy, delivery and reporting, and leads communication across the consortium and dissemination of its outputs. In her free time, she researches Grenglish, the innovative mixing of Greek and English by the UK’s Greek Cypriot community, language of food and language and ageing.
Adeeba Khan
SPROCKET Coordinator
Senior Finance Administrator
Ruksana has a background in Education Finance. She graduated from City University in 2001 after gaining a honours degree in Management and Systems. She joined an accountancy firm BDO before embarking on a career at a Further Education (FE) College within their Core Finance dept. Ruksana has since held a variety of financial management roles within different FE institutions, joining CORU in 2017. She has a passion for working in the public sector and education finance services.
Senior Research Coordinator
Following a degree in Zoology at University of Wales-Bangor, Julie completed her training to become a HCPC registered Biomedical Scientist in histology. Whilst working in biomedical science, Julie completed her MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine before taking a Research Assistant post at the Gynaecological Cancer Research Centre, UCL in 2014. From January 2017 she worked on the British Women’s Heart and Health Study at the Institute of Health Informatics, and joined CORU in March 2018 as the study coordinator for Linking audit and national datasets in congenital heart services for quality improvement (LAUNCHES).
PhD Student
Diana has always followed her passion for strategic reasoning and decision-making in complex systems — what she likes to call “being the strategist”. She completed her first degree in mathematics at Imperial College London, then took an exploration into machine learning during her MPhil at the University of Cambridge, motivated by the success of AlphaGo and the general rise of AI. Since 2024, she continued her strategist journey as a PhD student at CORU. Using methods including system modelling, optimisation, game theory and mechanism design, she hopes to bring her interest into meaningful impact in healthcare systems.
Mehdi Hafezi
Research Fellow
Research Coordinator
Carol has extensive experience working in academic institutes in both research and support roles in the UK and US. She trained as a molecular virologist with a degree in Microbiology from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD in Molecular Virology from Imperial College London. Carol worked as a research scientist at UCSF and Mount Sinai University before switching to an academic support role as a laboratory manager at the Rockefeller University in New York. Carol then spent seven years working as a technical expert and coordinator on two capital projects at the University of Cambridge. Carol joined CORU in 2024 as a research coordinator on the OPTICAL Study.
PhD Student
Jun’s research interests are in the areas of Bayesian inference and computational statistics. She studied pure mathematics in the first and second years of her bachelor and selected the statistics stream in her junior year. After completing her BSc at Sichuan University, she gained her MSc in Statistics from Imperial College London, focusing on sequential Monte Carlo and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. During her PhD, she hopes to develop new computational approaches and algorithms for dynamic problems and, at the same time, apply them to clinical care.
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Honorary Research Fellow
Victoria’s research interests are in the areas of Bayesian statistics and Uncertainty Quantification. She gained her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Exeter, focussing on methods in UQ for complex physical systems using computer simulators. After completing her PhD, Victoria worked at the Alan Turing Institute, where she developed practical tools for uncertainty management in government modelling. In November 2021, she joined CORU, where she was working on computational statistics methods for clinical care and healthcare and biological systems models as part of CHIMERA hub. In February 2023, Victoria joined University of Exeter for a lectureship position in Statistics and Data Science. Currently, she holds the position of Honorary Research Fellow at CORU and continues her work with CHIMERA hub.
Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Tom is an Associate Professor of Health Data Science holding a joint position between University of Exeter Medical School and the Institute of Data Science and AI. He is a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Between 2014 and 2019, Tom led the NIHR CLAHRC Wessex funded Data Science research group at University of Southampton. His early career was spent as software engineer and Operational Research modeller in industry and the public sector. He has worked for 10 years as a researcher with NIHR funded CLAHRC infrastructure. Tom is a methodologist with expertise in applying computer simulation methods, optimisation and machine learning in health service delivery. His work aims to translate Data Science and Operational Research tools to improve the quality and safety of health and social care
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