Lab Members
The COMBYNE lab includes the following core members:
Roman is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey. He leads the COMBYNE lab and is Spokesperson of the BioDynaMo collaboration. His research focuses on computational models of biological systems, usually with a mechanistic as well as an explainable context. Oftentimes, the models are used to produce biomedically relevant results and predictions, or functional outputs.
Umar is a Computational Neuroscience PhD Student under Roman Bauer at the University of Surrey. His project centres around simulating the realistic development of the mammalian neocortex through agent-based modelling. The project aims to produce a holistic model showing fully connected and functional cortex arising from simple genetic rules
Katherine is a Computational Neuroscience PhD student supervised by Dr Roman Bauer. Her project uses graph theoretical methods to understand the development of the human brain in neonates. Using these methods, the project aims to understand brain connectivity in scenarios such as premature birth, as well as understanding the interplay between structural and functional connectivity.
Ryan is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Surrey, and is a core developer for the BioDynaMo Collaboration. His work is in creating agent-based models of biofilms. These models are used to predict biofilm shape and performance. These predictions can be used as guidance to design environments and reactors that alter this performance.
Rafail is a Computer Science PhD researcher at the University of Surrey. His research focuses on utilising AI and LLM based approaches to automate software engineering and code optimisation. He works also with TurinTech AI.
Cayla graduated from her Master’s in Biochemistry from the University of Surrey and returned to do a PhD in Computational Biology. She is also part of the BioDynamo collaboration, of which she uses agent-based modelling to illustrate retinal development. She plans to use her models in conjunction with clinical research that focuses on retinal-based biomarkers of age-related diseases such Alzheimer’s, which may allow for a better understanding of the cognitive decline which we know little about.
Aaron Wing is a postgraduate researcher in the University of Surrey. His expertise is in Artificial Intelligence and his main interests are in computer vision and biologically inspired computing. Aaron's' current research is on finding an explainable model for the early diagnosis of multiple forms of dementia.
Mohsen wants to better understand how the brain works. His research interests include computational neuroscience and bio-inspired modelling. Currently, he is working on computational inference of the developmental process of neural networks in the brain to give rise to novel AI methods. He graduated from Amirkabir University of Technology with a master's degree in biomedical engineering and is currently a PhD student at the University of Surrey.
Other Collaborators
Associated PhD students are Nicolo Cogno, Daniel Cyrus and Huan Huang.
Collaborators/Partners include Dr Vasileios Vavourakis (University of Cyprus), Dr Marco Manca (SCImPULSE Foundation), Prof. Cees van Leeuwen (KU Leuven), Prof. Marco Durante (GSI Helmholtz Centre) and others.