Professor Alicja Rudnicka is a Professor in Statistical Epidemiology in the Population Health Research Institute.  She has expertise in large-scale population based artificial intelligence (AI) retinal imaging projects. She has been involved in evaluating AI technology to analyse retinal images from diabetic patients to detect sight-threatening diabetic eye disease, and recently secured funding from The NHS Transformation Directorate and The Health Foundation (funding managed by the National Institute of Health and Care Research) to evaluate the performance of such systems in different population groups (e.g., by age or ethnicity) prior to commissioning and deployment within the English NHS Diabetic Eye Screening Programme. Other recent research has focused on the utility of detailed quantification of the retinal microvasculature from retinal images as a biomarker of vascular health/status in relation to health outcomes such as type 2 diabetes (T2D), cardiovascular disease and circulatory mortality.  She has examined retinal vessel characteristics in large population-based adult studies in relation to cardiometabolic risk markers and disease, including the EPIC Norfolk and UK Biobank datasets.

Alicja has also undertaken complex Bayesian meta-analysis in ophthalmic epidemiology to quantify the global burden of common eye diseases.  With the Population Health Research Institute she collaborates with colleagues on other areas of public health importance including the effect of the built environment on health, accuracy of body composition measurement in children the difference ethnic groups as well as collaborating with colleagues within St George's University Hospital Trust on breast cancer surgery research.