News

The Health Innovation Ecosystem and the Health Innovation and Wellbeing Research Community are co-organising a one-day virtual conference where we can present our work and our thinking about these and related issues. The conference will take place on Wednesday 24 June 2020, 10:00 – 13:15 and is open to any member of UoW, from all disciplines and at all career stages (including postgraduate students). Click here to register.

A PhD graduate from the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Dr Mohsen Mesgarpour was runner up for the Operational Research (OR) Society PhD Prize, for the "Most Distinguished Body of Research leading to the Award of a Doctorate in the field of OR". Dr Mesgarpour completed his PhD in 2017 with a dissertation called "Predictive Risk Modelling of Hospital Emergency Readmission, and Temporal Comorbidity Index Modelling Using Machine Learning Methods," under the supervision of Professor Thierry Chaussalet, Director of the Health and Social Care Modelling Group (HSCMG) and Dr Salma Chahed (HSCMG). Original article on the University of Westminster Website

Mahmoud Aldraimli, a PhD researcher from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, successfully led a group of experts to build machine learning models to assist in the prediction of toxicities in breast cancer data. Hosted by the University of Manchester, the Radiotherapy Machine Learning network event was the first of its kind, a joint initiative with the NCRI Clinical and Translational Radiotherapy (CTRad) group. It brought together cancer clinicians and experts from the Machine Learning community to address challenges in cancer radiotherapy to build high-quality outputs. Mahmoud succeeded in the competitive selection process and secured a place in the event as a Machine Learning Expert. He started his PhD studies on “Building Machine Learning Models for Breast Cancer Risk Pr

Dr Marie Polley, co-founder of the Social Prescribing Network and Senior Lecturer in Health Sciences, was invited on Tuesday 8 January to the House of Commons to discuss and brief MPs on social prescribing. Dr Marie Polley and her team from The Social Prescribing Network at the University of Westminster, together with, the College of Medicine have been collaborating with NHS England for the past three years to design a new referral route for the NHS, called Social Prescribing. Social prescribing is a means of enabling GPs and other frontline healthcare professionals to refer patients to a link worker. This provides them with a face-to-face conversation to discuss their concerns and patients can learn about opportunities to improve their health and wellbeing through non-medical routes. ...

Dr Louise Thomas and Professor Jimmy Bell from the University of Westminster’s Research Centre of Optimal Health collaborated with a consortium of scientists from the UK including Universities of Exeter and Brunel as well as scientists across Europe. The new collaborative research revealed a combination of genes that are linked to higher BMI but paradoxically protect people from developing Type-2 diabetes and heart disease. It appears that despite the increased BMI, these participants show a favourable fat distribution such as increased superficial body fat (subcutaneous) but significantly lower deleterious internal fat (visceral and liver). The study, recently published in the renowned scientific journal Diabetes, included measurements of body fat and liver fat content recorded through