Dr. Barbara Villarini is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and an active researcher in medical imaging computing and 3D data regisitration and reconstruction.

She graduated in Electronics Engineering at the University of Perugia, Italy, in 2005. She received her master’s degree in Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Perugia, in 2008, and her doctorate degree in Information Engineering also from the University of Perugia in 2012. Her doctoral work was focused on multimedia and image processing, 2D/3D image and video quality assessment and error protection. Following a period working as software developer for Digital Cinema applications, she joined for almost three years the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC) at UCL as research associate to work in the field of image-guided interventions, developing novel technologies for minimal invasive procedures for diagnosing and treating prostate cancer. The multidisciplinary team, of which Dr. Villarini was a member, won a number of awards for contributions to research and cancer care, including the prestigious British Medical Journal award of Innovation Team of the Year (2015).

Currently her research interests include combining image-processing techniques with machine learning algorithms to solve challenging problems in order to improve wellbeing and health care. In 2020 she has received the Royal Academy Engineering – Leverhulme trust Fellowship award working on the development of an AI-driven system for organs reconstruction and morphological features extraction from medical images.