Prof Antoniya Georgieva

This talk will focus on both the career journey and the science behind it, building up to the Oxford Labour Monitoring group that Georgieva is leading. She journeyed from a BSc in Applied Mathematics in Sofia (Bulgaria), through a PhD in Machine Learning and Artificial Neural Networks in Portsmouth (UK), to a junior post-doc at Oxford in fetal monitoring based at the JR Hospital, to now as a successful leader of a multidisciplinary research group, which is about to test for the first time at the bedside her data-driven decision support tool for triage at the onset of labour (the Fit for Labour test). Oxford Labour Monitoring is committed to preventing injury of babies during labour and delivery, caused by lack of oxygen in utero - rare but devastating events. Our work will potentially benefit families, clinicians and healthcare systems by reducing brain injuries, the deaths of babies during labour or after birth and unnecessary medical interventions in childbirth.

Speaker Bio

I have developed my career in biomedical research, building on my expertise in machine learning, computing and mathematics, but specialising in intrapartum (in labour) fetal monitoring. I am now leading an ambitious programme to develop data-driven decision-support software in this clinical field. I am uniquely positioned to achieve this by working with the world’s largest and most complete birth cohort of routine labour data (100,000 deliveries). I obtained a BSc(Hons) in Applied Mathematics from the Technical University of Sofia (Bulgaria) and a PhD in Computer Science from Portsmouth University. I joined the Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Oxford for a post-doctoral position in 2007. In 2016 I was awarded a NIHR Career Development Fellowship to grow my independent research group. In the same year, I became a Research Fellow at Wolfson College and also joined the newly formed Big Data Institute at Oxford.