Leading Team | Researchers | Project Partners
Post Doctoral Research Assistants
Simão Laranjeira
University College London
Simão completed an MEng degree in Electric and Electronic Engineering at Kings College London. His final master’s project was on Microwave imaging of Breast Cancer supervised by Dr Panagiotis Kosmas. His work focused on developing a realistic in silico model of microwave propagation in breast tumours.
Following his Master’s, Simão was accepted onto the Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Oxford, funded by the EPSRC and supervised by Prof. Stephen Payne. His DPhil involved investigating pathological mechanisms common to many neurodegenerative diseases. These included cytotoxic oedema and pro-resolving inflammatory mechanisms.
He has since been a post-doctoral research fellow in Prof. Rebecca Shipley’s team, developing stochastic in silico models of neurite growth during peripheral nerve injury repair and testing novel biomaterial repair strategies. Additionally, he provided machine learning labelling solutions for gold-standard techniques for assessing repair outcome in animal models.
Now he hopes to apply all this knowledge to the challenge of metastatic cancer in the spine by developing mathematical models of tumour growth and consequent bone fractures, including how biomaterials can cater to patient-specific characteristics.
Ryan Murphy
Imperial College London
Ryan Murphy is a post-doctoral researcher within the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London. He received his MEng in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Southampton in 2017. Following this, he moved to Imperial College London to undertake post-graduate studies funded by EPSRC with an industrial partnership with Airbus Central R&T, and received his PhD in 2021.
His research primarily focusses on the development of computationally efficient methods to couple scales within multiscale topology optimisation frameworks. A further area of active research includes the derivation and integration of machine-learning techniques to vastly reduce the computational expense of non-linear structural analysis.
Dilaksan Thillaithevan
Imperial College London
Dilaksan Thillaithevan is a research assistant within the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London. His research has been focused on multiscale structural optimisation and improving the real-world robustness of optimised multiscale structures. In particular, efficiently recovering microscale stresses to predict failure on the macroscale and introducing material uncertainty to account for defects arising during the additive manufacture of intricate multiscale structures. He has also derived algorithms for visualising and simulating large, complex multiscale structures in a computationally efficient manner.
He completed his MEng in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at the University of Southampton in 2017. Following his master’s degree, he worked as a technology business analyst at Fidelity International before starting his post-graduate studies at Imperial College London in 2018, funded by the Aeronautics Department.
PhD Student Researchers
Borut Lampret
Imperial College London
I graduated with a Bachelors and Masters Degree in Physics from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. During my studies I worked on ferromagnetic ferrofluids at the Jožef Stefan Institute in the Department of Complex Matter. During this same period I also briefly worked on diode pumped fiber lasers at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, in the Laboratory for Photonics and Laser Systems.
After graduating with a Masters degree I began my PhD studies in Cellular Bionics at Imperial College London in the Department of Design Engineering. As part of my PhD I developed a 3D printer that utilizes light to selectively activate bacteria suspended in hydrogel to produce biological material.
Grant Lauder
University College London
Grant Lauder is a PhD research Student within the Mechanical Engineering department of UCL (University College London). He received a 1st class honours (BEng) in Biomedical Engineering, at the University of Dundee in 2022.
His Undergraduate thesis involved Mechanical Design and Construction of a Flexible Miniaturized Soft Joint for a Robotic Colonoscope. He hopes to apply his mechanical understanding and background knowledge on how tumour growth is affected by its surroundings
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