Following several years under the outstanding leadership of Professor Julia Schnabel, we are pleased to announce the appointment of our new Director, Professor Alistair Young.
Professor Schnabel served as Director of the first Centre for Doctoral Training in Medical Imaging programme at King’s College London since 2015 and led its successful renewal as Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Smart Medical Imaging in 2019.
She is now stepping down from her position, yet will maintain a part-time appointment at King’s School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences and will continue to be active in our CDT in an advisory capacity.
Professor Sebastien Ourselin, Head of the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at King’s College London said:
Professor Schnabel’s leadership has been vital to the growth and development of the CDT and its students. Her contributions have ensured a continued prestige and ongoing output of world-class teaching and research that has had a profound societal impact. On behalf of the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, I thank Professor Schnabel for her tireless contributions to the CDT.
We now welcome Professor Alistair Young, whose impressive background in Medical Image Computing and Machine Learning for Cardiovascular Data Analytics – fields which are strongly aligned with the CDT’s research themes – and dedication to progressing research and education will undoubtedly continue propelling the CDT as a centre of excellence.
Professor Schnabel said: “It has been an absolute pleasure serving as Director of the CDT in Medical Imaging and the CDT in Smart Medical Imaging over the past five years. Professor Young will bring a wealth of experience to the role and I am working closely with him to ensure a smooth transition.”
Professor Young joined King’s in 2018 as Professor of Cardiovascular Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence and Head of International at King’s School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences. Before this, he served as Head of Anatomy and Medical Imaging at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Professor Young has established and managed doctoral programmes, supervised numerous research students and has been an active member of the CDT since joining King’s. He is also the Principal Investigator of the Cardiac Atlas Project, which provides cardiac imaging data and analysis tools to the research community.
His appointment as Director of our CDT followed a call for expressions of interest, a thorough and competitive interview process, and the approval of our main funder, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Professor Young said: “I am excited to join the leadership team of the CDT who, along with the admin team and academic staff, are an exceptionally talented and dedicated group of people. The student experience offered by the CDT is one of the best in the world and it is an honour to help the careers of the scientists and engineers and leaders of the future.”