Our people

Rebecca Shipley

Director, Institute of Healthcare Engineering

Professor Rebecca Shipley OBE is a Professor of Healthcare Engineering in UCL Mechanical Engineering and Director of the IHE. 

Her research interests lie in mathematical and computational modelling in medicine and biology, tissue engineering and human physiology, with a particular emphasis on multidisciplinary approaches which integrate data from biological experiments, imaging and clinical sources. 

Marianna Obrist

Deputy Director (Digital Health)

Professor Marianna Obrist is a Professor of Multisensory Experiences in the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC). 

Her research ambition is to establish touch, taste, and smell as interaction modalities in human-computer interaction (HCI).

Geoff Parker

Deputy Director (Translation)

Geoff is a Professor of Healthcare Engineering, Imaging and Enterprise in UCL Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. 

He leads the Quantitative Imaging Group (QIG) at the Centre for Medical Image Computing and is affiliated with the UCL Queen Square Multiple Sclerosis Group. QIG's research focuses on the development of imaging biomarkers using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Deputy Director (Clinical) - TBC

Alice Hardy

Communications & Impact Manager

I lead communications for the Institute of Healthcare Engineering. My role involves sharing our leading research with the wider world - crafting press releases, publishing news articles, managing social media and creating engaging digital content. My objective is to ensure that the IHE is the one-stop-shop for healthcare engineering at UCL, and to grow our profile further afield. 

I also manage the IHE Impact Impact Fellowship, a training programme which helps UCL researchers make impact and engage with people beyond university walls. 

Ferdouse Akhter

Marketing & Community Manager

I support the IHE with communications and marketing. That includes the usual things like email, social media and events but my role also involves finding new ways to engage with the communities we have at UCL and in London to expand the impact of the IHE. And that's why this job is so interesting - ideas I have come to fruition and that's always so fulfilling to see.

Prior to the IHE, I worked at Students' Union UCL doing digital marketing - which comes in handy when trying to cultivate relationships with different student groups at UCL.

Eric de Silva

Research & Development Manager

My PhD was in extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. I then began work into statistical & population genetics and biological networks & evolutionary biology in the Theoretical Systems Biology group at Imperial College, London. Following a stint in science communication as Scientific Liaison Officer at Sense About Science, I worked in the Centre for Process Systems Engineering developing mathematical models of protein synthesis. I subsequently joined the Evolutionary Epidemiology group at MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis & Modelling developing computational models for how evolutionary changes at the genetic sequence level interact with those at the epidemiological scale.

In 2012 I was appointed Associate Director for UCL’s Institute for Biomedical Engineering responsible for creating new links and collaborative efforts between groups/disciplines across UCL & partner hospitals. From 2015 I headed Research & Development at UCL’s new Institute of Healthcare Engineering and in 2018 joined the Centre for Medical Image Computing where I worked at the interface of brain and cardiac imaging, human genetics and patient health and biomarker data, using a mixture of neuroimaging, molecular genetics, computational biology and machine learning.