Hi! I’m Claudia Vanea.

I’m an AI researcher based in New York City. I recently completed a PhD at Oxford in AI for Health and I am curently exploring what’s next at South Park Commons, where I co-lead the AI Reasoning forum.

On my PhD, I built a multi-stage deep learning pipeline for hierarchically modeling biological structure across terabytes of placenta histology images. The pipeline combined object detection and image classification models (computer vision) with graph neural networks to comprehensively phenotype the placenta in healthy and diseased states. In my last few months, I built a proof-of-concept graph compression autoencoder to localise and summarise placental lesions.

I published at top conferences and journals (NeurIPS and Nature Communications) and supervised 6 interns across the degree. I was student representative and based on student feedback, I proposed, designed and taught the PhD-level module applying software engineering practices to research code. I taught this module across three years of my PhD.

Prior to my PhD, I obtained a Bachelors in Philosophy and a Masters in Computer Science from UCL, graduating with the highest honours.

Outside of work, I love birds, bouldering and video games (particularly Soulslikes!). I used to grow chilies in the UK and am currently trying to figure out my NYC setup. My first love was Philosophy so I’m always up for a good debate.