OUR TEAM

Banerjee Lab

Academic Staff

Amitava heads up the Banerjee Lab. He is Professor of Clinical Data Science at UCL and Honorary Consultant Cardiologist, UCLH and Barts Health. After qualifying from Oxford, Ami trained as a junior doctor in Oxford, Newcastle, Hull and London. His interest in preventive cardiology and evidence-based medicine led to a Masters in Public Health at Harvard(2004/05), an internship at the World Health Organisation(2005) and DPhil in epidemiology from Oxford(2010).

Amitava was Clinical Lecturer in Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Birmingham, before taking up the position of Senior Lecturer in Clinical Data Science and Honorary Consultant in Cardiology at the Farr Institute of Health Informatics in August 2015. In addition to general cardiology, he has special interest in heart failure and atrial fibrillation, and also the role of informatics and electronic health records in delivering better patient care.

Ashkan joined the UCL Institute of Health Informatics as postdoctoral data scientist in 2020 and is now a senior research fellow. Ashkan held his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from University of Tabriz, Iran, worked as data scientist since 2018 in Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and developed award-winning predictive models for predicting non-attendance in secondary care during his second PhD in Informatics. His major interest is health data science, machine learning, and image processing. 

Dr Mohamed Mohamed 

Mohamed is an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in Cardiology at University College London and an interventional cardiology registrar at the Barts Heart Centre. His primary academic interest is in cardiovascular outcomes research, with a focus on leveraging large national datasets and registries from the UK and the USA. He has a strong foundation in research methodology and medical statistics, developed during his time as an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow. In addition to his research, Dr. Mohamed is actively involved in medical education and clinical leadership, having held several roles that reflect his commitment to these areas.

Dr Rachel Benchekroun

Rachel is a mixed methods researcher on the EU-funded RAPHAEL study, which integrates the RAPHAEL palliative care approach into existing heart failure care pathways. She is based in the UCL Institute of Health Informatics.


Rachel also works at UCL Social Research Institute on the NIHR-funded Fair Food Futures UK study (led by University of York and UCL). Before this, Rachel held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship which built on her ethnographic PhD research exploring the impact of ‘Hostile Environment’ policies and legal and financial precarity on mothers' interpersonal relationships and access to support.


Rachel holds a PhD in Sociology from UCL. Her research interests include social and health inequalities, migration and mobilities, support networks, and family and friendship practices. She is experienced in participant observation, in-depth interviewing, focus groups, visual and place-based methods, participatory methods, co-producing research and knowledge exchange.


Dr Elpida Vounzoulaki

Elpida is an Honorary Visiting Researcher at the Banerjee Lab, supported by the NIHR Development and Skills Enhancement (DSE) Award. Her research focuses on health data science, with particular interests in cardiometabolic complications, women’s health, and real-world epidemiology. Dr Vounzoulaki brings extensive experience in diabetes epidemiology and has contributed to high-impact research using large datasets from the UK and internationally.

PhD Students

Alex  is a gastroenterology registrar currently on out of programme as a clinical research training fellow completing a PhD supervised by Prof Laurence Lovat and Dr Ami Banerjee. His research interests lie in harnessing health data to see if it can predict the development of gastrointestinal cancers and its pre-cancerous states. He is also interested in improving health service pathways and outcomes, especially in light of the challenges faced in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Sedigheh Zabihi 

Sedi joined the team in October 2025 on a PhD Studentship funded by Alzheimer's Research UK. She will be investigating associations between CVD and dementia to better define, predict and prevent dementia in nationally representative electronic health records (EHR).  Sedi has held research positions previously at Queen Mary, University of London and UCL, working on prevention and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. 

Professional Services

Sarah Clegg 

Sarah joined the Institute of Health Informatics in 2019 and is Research Manager for the Banerjee Lab.