Get in Contact with us:
You can reach CORU on 020 76794509. If we're not able to take your call, please leave a message and we'll call you back.
For all enquiries about CORU and our work, including consultancy requests, please contact our Director, Professor Sonya Crowe.
Coru Directors:
Sonya Crowe
CORU's Director:
Sonya, PhD in physics, joined CORU in 2009 from the Department of Health, after working in Government OR Services. She has led projects on health and social care innovation, health protection, and global health. Awarded a 2013 Health Foundation Improvement Science Fellowship, she focuses on combining quantitative and qualitative OR, linking national datasets for congenital heart disease, and enhancing OR’s role in service improvement.
Alejandro Diaz
CORU's Deputy Director
Alex, an applied mathematician, works on uncertainty quantification, Bayesian inference, and model calibration. An EPSRC Fellow, he leads DATA-CENTRIC, developing Bayesian methods to quantify computational uncertainty. He collaborates with industry, government, and SMEs, has organised four study groups, and joined CORU in 2019 to develop statistical and computational methods for large datasets supporting clinical decision-making.
Academic and research staff:
Christina Pagel
Professor of Operational Research
Christina, with a background in maths and physics, moved from post-doctoral physics to applied health mathematics in 2005. Former CORU Director (2017–2022) and Professor of Operational Research, her work focuses on paediatric intensive care and heart surgery outcomes. A 2016–17 Harkness Fellow, she co-directs the EPSRC CHIMERA hub and is passionate about using data to improve healthcare. Since 2020, she has served on Independent SAGE and has been featured in the
Martin Utley
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.
Luca Grieco
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 healthcare.
Ferran Espuny Pujol
Honorary Research Fellow
Ferran, with a PhD in Mathematics and an MSc in Statistics and OR, researched Geometry and Statistics in Computer Vision before focusing on health and social care from 2013. He joined CORU in 2019, working on congenital heart services projects LAUNCHES QI and CHAMPION. In September 2024, he became a Lecturer at the University of Reading and continues as Honorary Research Fellow at CORU.
Thomas Monks
Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Tom is an Associate Professor of Health Data Science at University of Exeter Medical School and the Institute of Data Science and AI, and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He led the NIHR CLAHRC Wessex Data Science group (2014–2019), having begun as a software engineer and OR modeller. With 10 years in NIHR-funded research, he applies simulation, optimisation, and machine learning to improve health and social care quality and safety.
Victoria Volodina
Honorary Research Fellow
Victoria, PhD in Mathematics from the University of Exeter, specialises in Bayesian statistics and Uncertainty Quantification for complex systems. She worked at the Alan Turing Institute developing tools for uncertainty in government modelling. She joined CORU in 2021, contributing to computational statistics for clinical care and CHIMERA hub models. In 2023, she became a Statistics and Data Science lecturer at Exeter and remains Honorary Research Fellow at CORU.
Qi Huang
Research Fellow
Qi, an engineer with a PhD in signal processing and communications from Edinburgh, has focused since 2016 on applying statistical methods to healthcare data. Her research includes modelling circadian rhythm time series to address questions in chronobiology. She 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.
Zella King
Research Fellow
Zella King, PhD in Organizational Psychology from Birkbeck, spent 15 years in business schools, publishing on HR, careers, and networks. Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management (2007), she co-founded a successful training company in 2014. In 2016, she shifted to health data research, developing ML models for emergency bed demand at UCLH (published in Nature Digital Medicine), and now works as an embedded researcher applying analysis and modelling to hospital operations.
Professional Services:
Julie Taylor
Senior Research Coordinator
Julie studied Zoology at University of Wales-Bangor and trained as an HCPC-registered Biomedical Scientist in histology. While working in biomedical science, she completed an MSc in Epidemiology at LSHTM, then joined UCL’s Gynaecological Cancer Research Centre in 2014. From 2017, she worked on the British Women’s Heart and Health Study and joined CORU in 2018 as study coordinator for LAUNCHES, linking audit and national datasets in congenital heart services.
Carol McDonald
Research Coordinator
Carol, trained as a molecular virologist with a Microbiology degree from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD from Imperial College London, has extensive UK and US academic experience. She worked as a research scientist at UCSF and Mount Sinai, then as lab manager at Rockefeller University, and as technical expert on Cambridge capital projects. In 2024, she joined CORU as research coordinator for the OPTICAL Study.
Ruksana Begum
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
PhD Students:
Jun Cheng
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
Hugh Kinnear
PhD Student
Hugh completed his undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Warwick in 2019, with his final year integrated masters project focussing on quantum algorithms. Following this, he spent a year working as a mathematics tutor at a secondary school. Now returning to academia to undertake a PhD, he hopes to develop structural reliability Bayesian methods and data science techniques that can be applied to intensive care unit data.
Diana Xue
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 syste