In this video, Sara and her team discuss their study on ethnicity data in NHS England, and how they will use this research to improve health equity in research and practice. Find out more about the study here

Sara leads the Planetary Health Informatics Group at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine (Oxford) and the Machine Learning and Big Data Team of the Health Data Sciences Section in NDORMS (Oxford) which she joined in 2016. She is also affiliated with the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (Oxford) where she completed her doctoral and post-doctoral research in the Biomedical Signal Processing and Image Analysis Groups.

Her research applies artificial intelligence to international real-world health data, in order to further our understanding of disease and fills the gaps in global health, leveraging common data models and federated network analytics. She works closely with clinicians, engineers, clinical and environmental epidemiologists, conservationists, data scientists, and public and patient groups in the UK, Europe, Latin America, South Asia, and Africa to co-create models for equitable and ethical solutions for planetary health problems.  

Sara completed her DPhil in Engineering Science at the IBME, University of Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to that she received a Distinction for her MSc in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Oxford in 2009, as a Qualcomm Scholar. In 2007 she graduated with a BE in Electronics Engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology in Pakistan. 

Sara teaches a number of health data science courses at NDORMS and University-wide, and is Director of the "Observational health data science: epidemiology, machine learning, and health economics" course. She is also a faculty member at the NIHR BRC course "Data analysis: statistics - designing clinical research and biostatistics", and the "Real-world epidemiology with OMOP common data model" summer school organised by the Health Data Science Section at NDORMS.

Sara supervises a number of research students including DPhil and MSc students at Oxford, as well as UK and overseas PhD students. Interested students are welcome to get in touch.