My PhD was focused on improving the state-of-the-art in Morphable Models, powerful 3D statistical models of the human face. I conducted my research under the supervision of Stefanos Zafeiriou in the iBUG group at Imperial College London. My iBUG profile gives a full list of my publications.
During my PhD I was also affiliated with Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), where I was an honorary researcher in the craniofacial department. Every day, the craniofacial surgeons at GOSH perform transformative surgery on children with facial conditions like Crouzon Syndrome or Apert Syndrome. A major challenge the surgeons face is that there are very few objective measurements for such corrective surgery, which complicates surgical training, planning, and assessment.
My role at GOSH was to leverage iBUGs expertise in 3D facial modelling to gain a quantitative understanding of craniofacial surgery. Doing so involved tacking extremely challenging and sensitive questions like what does it mean, mathematically or perceptually, to look normal or abnormal? In order to start to approach some of these questions, GOSH, in collaboration with other institutions, collected MEIN3D, a database of 12,000 3D facial scans. My research involved statistically analysing MEIN3D, devising experiments that took us a step closer to an ultimate goal of one day providing an objective guide to craniofacial surgical planning and assessment.