Meet the team
Led by Professor Li Su, the AICN Group has PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from neuroscience, psychology, medical, mathematics and computer science backgrounds.
Group Leader
Professor Li Su is Chair of Neuroimaging and the Head of the Artificial Intelligence and Computational Neuroscience Group.
He has a joint appointment at the Neuroscience Institute, University of Sheffield and the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. His research group and laboratory locate in both universities. He is a Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge and a Specialist Committee Member at National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
He is a regional co-leed for the National Network for the Application of Data Science and AI to Dementia Research (DEMON) and member of Grant Review Committee for the Lewy Body Society.
He is an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience and a member of Alzheimer's Society's Research Strategy Council.
Professor Li Su is also passionate about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in workplace, research and society in general. He is the Co-chair of the University Staff Race Equality Network (REN) at University of Cambridge, and the Departmental Co-director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at University of Sheffield.
Postdoctoral researchers
Dr Maria Prats-Sedano (Cambridge)
Maria is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the Lewy body disorders. She is the study coordinator on the Multimodal imaging and computational modelling of Dementia with Lewy bodies (MILOS) Project.
She holds a BSc Hons Degree in Psychology and a PhD (Doctor Europaeus) in Neuroscience awarded by the University of Padova (Italy). She has experience working as a Clinical Neuropsychologist and researcher in international neurorehabilitation and research centres with patients with neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr Yi Zhang (Cambridge)
Yi is a postdoctoral researcher from the Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence (ISTBI) at Fudan University and a visiting researcher at the department of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. He mainly works on resting-state and task fMRI/EEG/MEG data analysis on healthy participants.
His research interests include sex and gender in the brain, and brain dynamics. In his postdoctoral project in Cambridge, he will explore MEG biomarkers for dementia with Lewy bodies using techniques he developed during his PhD.
Dr Carlos Muñoz Neira (Sheffield)
Carlos is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Division of Neuroscience. He has a PhD in Clinical Neurosciences and holds a Master of Sciences in Neuropsychology (University of Bristol).
His doctoral studies were aimed at investigating the neural correlates of impaired insight in frontotemporal dementia employing both neuropsychological testing and structural brain imaging.
Before moving to England, he qualified as a Clinical Psychologist (Universidad de Chile) and worked at the Neurology Department of a renowned public Hospital in Santiago de Chile (Hospital del Salvador) for several years, where he combined clinical and research work. His research interests focus on clinical neuropsychology and brain imaging in patients with different forms of cognitive decline, including mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal, dementia, vascular dementia, and dementia with Lewy bodies.
Clinical Research Fellows
Dr Elizabeth McKiernan (Cambridge)
Elizabeth is a medical doctor and an Alzheimer's Society Clinical Research Fellow working primarily on the use of 7T MRI to investigate dementia with Lewy bodies and Alzheimer's disease.
PhD students
Miss Ludmila Kucikova (Sheffield)
Ludka is a PhD Student at the University of Sheffield, where she combines computational approaches and multimodal imaging to investigate neuronal dysfunctions and mental deficits in neurodegeneration, namely Dementia with Lewy bodies (MILOS project) and Alzheimer’s Disease (Prevent-Dementia project).
She holds a Master of Science by Research degree in Integrative Neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh and an undergraduate degree (MA) in Psychology from the University of Aberdeen. Her research interests include computational psychiatry and neurology, multimodal imaging, connectomics, and unhealthy ageing.
Miss Dunia Al Hamad (Sheffield)
Dunia is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, where she studies the neuroinflammatory and neurovascular microenvironment in Alzheimer's disease using PET/MRI imaging modalities. She gained a master degree in medical imaging from University of Leeds - United Kingdom, and an undergraduate degree (BSc) in radiological sciences from King Saud University - Saudi Arabia.
Her research interests include multimodal imaging (PET/MRI), functional, spectroscopy and susceptibility weighted MR and TESPO PET. Moreover, she supports several studies in providing detailed physical, neurological, and neuropsychiatric examinations and general cognition assessment.
MSc/MPhil students
Miss Hoda Kalabizadeh (Cambridge)
Hoda is a Health Data Science MPhil student at the University of Cambridge. For her MPhil project, she works on developing statistical models from neuroimaging biomarkers (MEG, EEG and MRI) to investigate underlying patterns and potential diagnostic features of dementia with Lewy bodies.
Hoda holds a MEng First Class in Biomedical Engineering from Imperial College London. Her research interests include signal and image processing, machine learning, and computational statistics, with a special interest in their application to neuroscience.
Associated members
Mr Vlad Morozan
Vlad is an Associated Researcher in the AICN Group working on computational modelling that could explain the mechanisms behind recurrent visual hallucinations in DLB. He is a medical doctor at the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bucharest, Romania, where he has worked with mice exploring animal models of dystonia and epilepsy.
Visiting researchers
Dr Yujing Huang (Cambridge)
Yujing is a visiting researcher in the lab working on the EEG/MEG data analysis and acquisition in the 'Multimodal imaging and computational modelling of Dementia with Lewy bodies' (MILOS) project. Before leaving the UK, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the AICN Group based in Cambridge.
Mr Weijie Huang (Sheffield)
Weijie is a visiting researcher in the Division of Neuroscience. He holds a BSc in Mathematics, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and is conducting PhD degree in Psychology Department, Beijing Normal University.
His research focus on the relationship between cognitive aging and cerebral aging by using magnetic resonance imaging. He is currently applying machine learning and deep learning on magnetic resonance imaging dataset to predict cognitive decline.
Miss Lu Cheng (Cambridge)
Lu is a visiting researcher at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. She is conducting her PhD degree at the School of Management, Zhejiang University. Her research interests include decision neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. She is currently working on a study using computation model to decompose decision-making process for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s diease.