Zuzanna Skórniewska
DPhil Student
Zuzanna began her DPhil in Population Health under a departmental scholarship in October, 2024. She is working with Professor Bartek Papiez and Professor Thomas Nichols on the extraction of imaging-derived biomarkers associated with tinnitus from brain MRI and retinal imaging using Diffusion Models (DM). She is particularly interested in conditioning DM on available demographic data for domain expansion of otherwise biased data sources, such as UK Biobank. Furthermore, she believes the generative powers of DM could drive causal inference discoveries, accelerating research into causes of tinnitus, which despite its global prevalence and significant individual burden, are still largely unknown.
Prior to her DPhil, Zuzanna worked as a research assistant for the Oxford University Department of Psychiatry with Doctor Maxime Taquet exploring the possible causes of cognitive decline in hospitalised COVID-19 survivors. Following this, she joined a team lead by Professor Noel J Buckley to develop self-supervised AI models capable of streamlining a feature discovery of iPSC-derived human microglia cells to accelerate Alzheimer’s drug discovery process.
She studied BSc in Physics and MSc in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton.