Biomedical Engineering and Healthcare
Principal Investigators
Zhanfeng Cui
FREng, Donald Pollock Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Oxford
Director of Strategic Projects, China Mathematics, Physical and Life Sciences Division
Director, JITRI IMPACT Institute at Oxford University
Cathy Ye
Associate Professor in Engineering Science, University of Oxford
Professor Cui and Professor Ye specialise in enabling technologies for tissue engineering and stem cell technology, such as the development of bioreactor technologies to enable bone, cartilage, tendon and skin culture to grow. A further area of interest is the study of the technology and science in cryopreservation and vitrification to preserve living cells and engineered tissues.
James Kwan
Associate Professor of Engineering Science, University of Oxford
Professor Kwan’s research interests focus on physical acoustics, namely ultrasound and cavitation. Prof Kwan’s research aims to engineer systems to harness the high energy of ultrasound and cavitation and promote drug delivery, gene transfer to cells, and sonochemistry.
David Clifton
Professor of Clinical Machine Learning, University of Oxford
Professor Clifton focuses on the development of AI for healthcare applications. Clifton’s lab at OSCAR will develop novel “smart” healthcare technologies, involving Chinese hospital partners and Chinese technology firms.
Co-PI
Dr. Haiyun Pei/Prof. Zhanfeng Cui’s group
Dr. Pei joined OSCAR in 2021. She was a post-doctoral associate in the Stem Cell Institute and in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. Her previous research focused on differentiation of embryonic stem cells toward the hepatic lineage, generation of induced pluripotent stem cells through reprogramming technology, as well as proliferation and differentiation of hematopoietic stem cells.
Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Petr Jurcicek / Prof. Cui & Prof. Cathy Ye’s group
Dr Petr Jurcicek joined OSCAR in January 2023 as a Senior Research Scientist in Prof. Cui’s and Prof. Cathy Ye’s group. He earned his PhD in 2014 at the Dalian University of Technology, School of Mechanical Engineering with a focus on microsystems technology (MEMS). During his research, he focused on computational fluid dynamics modelling of nano-electrospray ion transfer in AC electric fields from the atmospheric pressure region to the high vacuum of a mass spectrometer and developed a novel miniaturised device to improve ion transfer efficiency.
Since earning his PhD degree, Petr has pursued his professional career path in the biomedical and consumer products industry. Before he joined OSCAR, Petr worked at Sky UK Ltd, Europe’s largest media company and TV broadcaster based in the United Kingdom. There, he was heavily involved in Glass TV development and mass production, Sky’s first and largely successful TV product in the UK market. Petr is a seasoned mechanical design and R&D engineer with broad experience and knowledge of full product lifecycle, mass manufacturing, electronics design and software development.
Research Scientist
Dr. Zhangdaihong Liu / Prof David Clifton’s group
Zhangdaihong (Jessie) Liu undertook her PhD at the Mathematics for Real-World Systems CDT at University of Warwick. During this time, she was also a visiting PhD student at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, and a PhD enrichment student at the Alan Turing Institute. Prior to this, she obtained an MSc in Mathematics of Systems from Warwick University, an MSc in Mathematical Finance at Loughborough University, and a BSc in Mathematics at Shandong University, China.
Her PhD thesis entitled ‘Latent Variable Modelling of Population Neuroimaging and Behavioural Data’ focused on the development of a dimension reduction method that improves the interpretability of latent variable models applied to health-related datasets. Her research also involved uncovering latent patterns between neuroimaging, behavioural and demographic measures, as well as the application of various large dataset processing techniques.
Jessie’s research interests also include predictive modelling, feature extractions, recommender systems, deep learning and reproducible research.
Dr. Alexander Vasilyev/Prof. David Clifton’s group
Dr. Alexander Vasilyev joined OSCAR in September 2022 as a Research Scientist in Prof. David Clifton’s Digital Health group. He earned his Ph.D. in July 2020 at the School of Computer Science of Queen Mary University of London. His research during his Ph.D. study was focused on the development of computational models of human eye movements and the design of psychophysical experiments. Prior to his Ph.D. study, Alexander had 2 years of work experience in the drug discovery company Gero.ai as a researcher and later as a team leader of the science team.
Dr. Huilin Li/ Prof. Zhanfeng Cui's group
Dr. Huilin Li joined OSCAR in September, 2021 as a Research Scientist in Regenerative Medical Engineering. She earned her PhD in 2021 at the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Lab, Institute of Health Service and Transfusion Medicine, AMMS. Her former research focused on the direct hematopoietic reprogramming, hematopoietic stem cell expansion ex vivo, integration-free reprogramming of induced pluripotent stem cells and preferential hematopoietic differentiation in induced pluripotent stem cells. During her study, she published three SCI papers as the co-first author with IFs of 3.929, 4.556 and 6.832 respectively. She also had a fourth SCI paper published as the second author with an IF of 4.963.
Research Technician
Li Binbin/ Prof Zhanfeng Cui’s group
Binbin Li, as Research Technician, joined the Tissue Engineering Group led by Prof Cui and Prof Ye in September 2018. She graduated from Clinical Veterinary Department of Huazhong Agricultural University as graduate student in 2014. Since graduation, she worked in Animal Husbandry Bureau of Dangyang City and as director of the Animal Husbandry Technology Promotion Station in 2016. Then she worked as a research assistant in the Preventive Veterinary Laboratory of Huazhong Agricultural University in 2016 and 2017, mainly worked on the detection and analysis of swine epidemiology according to the needs of the project. Before joining in OSCAR, she serviced as a Global Safety Data Management Specialist for Pfizer (Wuhan) R&D Center, where she encompasses adverse event review and submitted reports according to appropriate Regulatory Authority requirement. Current research project would be the gene expression patterns of human mesenchymal stem cells in different culturing conditions.
Zhu Jiachen / Prof Cathy Ye’s group
Jiachen Zhu received the master's degree from Soochow University in July 2019 and joined OSCAR. Her research focuses on the development of silk protein micropattern biomaterials. The main work now is about the differences in gene expression of stem cells on the different surfaces of biomaterials.
Zeng Yida/ Prof Zhanfeng Cui’s group
Zeng yida received his bachelor degree in Biochemistry from Imperial College London in 2009. Have worked with GMP grade cell therapy for five years. Currently interested in the characterisation of mesenchymal stem cells.
Jiawei Ju
Project Manager
Jiawei Ju joined OSCAR in May 2023 as a project manager in in energy storage. She graduated from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014. She was engaged in product development and translating research outputs into practical applications in the environmental protection industry. At OSCAR, she is mainly responsible for the industrialization of energy storage related technologies.
